About A Boy
by Catherine Cook
Summary: While attempting to teach Occlumency to Harry Potter, a period of Severus Snape's past is revealed. A period he didn't realize existed.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter One**

A man and a boy, shouting at each other, while another, much older man watches:

"You're not calming yourself enough, Potter!" the man shouts, his shoulder-length black hair clasping his hollow cheeks like wings.

"Then try not screaming at me!" the boy replies hotly, his own black hair mussed and untidy.

"The whole _point_ of this is for you to learn how to guard your mind in adverse conditions, _Potter!_"

The old man in the corner cleared his throat. He was present precisely because he was afraid this sort of thing would be happening, as it had in the previous lessons that had occurred without his presence. "And it would be helpful for you, Severus Snape, if you could put aside your hatred and calm yourself for just a few minutes."

"'Calm myself'?" A muscle twitches in the black-haired man's left cheek.

"Yes, Severus," replied the old man, gently but firmly. "You're about forty seconds away from having a major stroke."

If it had been anyone else – even the black-haired man's own mother – he would have probably uttered some cutting remark. But one did not make cutting remarks to Albus Dumbledore.

So, instead, the black-haired man nodded, closed his eyes, and took several long, deep breaths. Perhaps by the time he opened them again...

He didn't realize that Harry Potter, having had dozens of embarrassing snippets of his life replayed before their eyes, would be smarting for revenge.

"_Legilimens!_" came the cry, from a teenaged throat raw and hoarse from an hour of shouting and spell-casting. And Potter's vengeful, focused mind forced its way into Snape's unguarded one.

Whatever calmness Severus Snape may have achieved was swept away in that instant. He felt rage, and a shame at having been caught unawares – how _dare_ that brat do this to him!

Meanwhile, Harry reveled in the sensation of access to Snape's twisty old mind. At last, at _last_ he'd managed to score a point off the greasy bastard! He knew he would pay for it later, but he would press on while he could – harder – _harder_ –

Images flashed through Harry's mind at lightning speed. A black-haired, black-eyed toddler watching happily as his mother pulled down a set of Gobstones from a battered bookshelf. The Dark Lord praising a teenaged Snape as the boy stared down dully at the newly-made mark on his arm. Lily Evans helping Snape with a Charms essay. Sirius Black stomping on a present Snape's mother had sent him...

The pressing suddenly got more difficult. Snape had recovered from his surprise and was now fighting Harry's intrusion with every ounce of power he had. But Harry didn't give up; he was in now, he knew he could do it, he could press hard and –

There was the sensation of something snapping. Or maybe it was like a boulder that had gone from sudden heat to sudden coldness and then back again, cracking under the strain. Whatever it was, it had the feel of a physical change, rather than a mental one.

And then a new set of images started appearing, bursting from Snape's brain with such force that Harry knew that Dumbledore could see them too:

The friendly, weather-worn face of a man, framed by a sky that was bluer than blue, looking down with concern at the young, black-haired boy lying on his back in the middle of a farm field. That same boy in a hayloft, stripped to a pair of jeans, getting his very first kiss from a pretty girl. The weatherbeaten man showing him how to drive a Muggle tractor. A motherly woman putting him to bed with a kiss on his forehead.

And then, blackness.

Harry Potter broke the connection just in time to see Dumbledore moving to Levitate Severus Snape's unconscious body before it hit the stone floor.

-----------------------------------

Two persons watching a third person as he was lowered, slowly and carefully, on top of a nondescript bed-quilt covering a four-poster bed.

"What happened, Professor?" asked Harry, once Dumbledore had finished setting down the still-unconscious Snape.

"That, I do not know for certain. But I am willing to hazard a guess or two." He turned towards Harry, his blue eyes piercing behind the gold-rimmed spectacles. "But first, you must tell me: Why did you attack him, Harry?"

"I didn't mean –" Harry had started to say. But, as he looked into the headmaster's sharp, unwavering gaze, he knew better than to finish that particular sentence.

"I was being stupid," he said instead, hanging his head. "I was so angry at him for – for always setting me up to fail in this, and in everything else over the past five years." He looked back up into Dumbledore's eyes. "I wanted, just once, to prove to him that I _could_ do it, that I _could_ learn to read his mind, and get a bit of my own back, despite his trying to sabotage me all the time."

"I see." Dumbledore let out a sigh.

Harry hung his head again. He couldn't bear to look Dumbledore in the face any more, to see the gentle reproach that was far less than what Harry knew he deserved at this point. He took a small wooden chair and pulled it next to Snape's bed, then sat down on it, all the while keeping his eyes on Snape's twitching, yet unaware, body.

"I will summon Madam Pomfrey," Dumbledore said quietly.

The headmaster turned on his heel and left the room. Harry found himself turning his head to stare at the place where Dumbledore had been standing.

---------------------------------------------

Madam Pomfrey put away her wand. There was a faint glow, the sort of glow resulting from spells used to diagnose illness, surrounding Professor Snape's body, but it was already fading. "I've heard about this sort of thing, Professor, but I've never seen it until now."

"The Hackett case?"

"Yes."

"I thought as much." Dumbledore took off his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his long, blade-like nose. He turned towards the man in the bed, and the boy sitting at beside, and his eyes blinked as their gaze lingered on the man's still form occupying a bed in the hospital wing. He sighed, and slowly replaced his spectacles.

"So," Dumbledore continued, "sometime in his early youth – after he came to Hogwarts, but before he took the Dark Mark – something occurred that caused someone else to want to wipe it from his memory." He paused, and took a deep breath. "Except that as is the case with most Memory Charms, they didn't actually wipe it, they merely suppressed it."

"Exactly, sir."

Harry looked up at Poppy and Dumbledore, his eyes wide with surprise. "He was hit with a _Memory Charm_, Professor?"

"He was indeed, Harry. And the caster was in all likelihood employed by the Ministry of Magic."

It seemed to Harry that the room had suddenly got rather chilly. "How do you know?" he whispered.

Dumbledore's mouth tightened in the way that it did only when he was extremely angry. "Because of the _technique_," he said, his voice suddenly hard and bitter, "and the determination to extirpate a whole swath of Severus' life. Only a trained Ministry Obliviator would be that thoroughgoing without actually causing much in the way of organic damage – much, that is, by Ministry standards."

He drew a large breath and held it for some time, then exhaled it slowly, sending the wisps of his white beard flying in a way that, at any other time and in any other place, would have been extremely funny. "I see the signs all too clearly, now. At the start of his fourth year, Severus seemed to be out of sorts, his schoolwork not up to his usual high standard. I put it down to aftereffects from the loss of his parents in the year just past, and his having to adjust to life with his aunt. I should have known better."

Harry turned to look at Snape, then back at Dumbledore and Poppy. "So... those last images we saw..."

"Those had been suppressed by the Memory Charm, yes."

Harry called up in his head his memories of what he had seen of those suppressed memories of Snape's. "But sir," he said, frowning, "why would anyone want to suppress those memories? You saw them, you know that they weren't _bad_ memories..."

Dumbledore held up his hand in a gesture of negation. "Sadly enough, Harry, I suspect that it's precisely _because _they weren't bad memories."

Harry's frown deepened. "But _why?_"

Dumbledore let out yet another loud sigh before he answered.

"In all likelihood -- because his aunt had requested it."

"Requested it!" Harry whispered.

"Yes, Harry. She had a hatred of all things Muggle and she would not have abided the notion that her nephew, her ward, would have had happy memories pertaining to Muggles and their existence." He looked over at Snape, who had started murmuring things as he slowly writhed and twitched in the bed. "And thus she would have wanted them removed, regardless of the cost to her nephew. She no doubt even rationalized it as doing him a favor."

"That's – that's horrible," Harry said.

"Yes, it is horrible," agreed Madam Pomfrey sadly. "But now – now he has them back. The problem is, he got them back all at once."

"Why is that a problem?"

"It was a shock to his system. It's overloaded his brain, Harry. It will take some time for him to get himself sorted again – if he can."

Harry felt as if he'd been kicked in the stomach. Snape was damaged, maybe dying – and it was all his fault. He felt the strong urge to vomit, but dug his fingernails into his palms so the pain would distract his gut from carrying out that urge right then and there.

"Is there anything we can do to help him?" Harry asked in a small voice, when at last he felt able to open his mouth without puking.

"We can watch over him, and feed him light broth and other liquids on occasion," replied Madam Pomfrey. "There will be periods when his coma will lighten, and he will verge on being fully awake. But those won't last long. However, he can take nourishment during those times. If all goes well, he'll come out of it in a few days."

"If all goes well," repeated Harry dully.

"If all goes well," agreed Dumbledore, but in a somewhat more cheerful tone than Harry. "In the meantime," he said, "it might help us if we were to take those memories of his that we witnessed and examine them in the Pensieve. I am most curious as to how he got them in the first place."

-----------------------

Madam Pomfrey eased her ample form into a chair at the table where Dumbledore and Harry were sitting. "Did you find anything?" she said, stifling a slight yawn as she glanced over at Snape lying motionless, for now, in his bed.

"We did indeed," replied Dumbledore, lightly brushing his beard with his fingers, as his stint in the Pensieve had disarrayed it somewhat. "It seems we are dealing with the two-month period between the end of his third year, and the beginning of his fourth."

"Ah. And what happened in that time?"

Dumbledore paused before answering. Then, he turned his thin, hollow-cheeked face towards Madam Pomfrey. "One moment, he was on the platform of King's Cross, going to meet his aunt. The next moment, he found himself in the middle of what appears to be a soybean field four thousand miles away from King's Cross."

Madam Pomfrey blinked in surprise. "What! He was Transported!"

"Yes, Transported," affirmed Dumbledore.

"How in the name of Merlin – did someone do this to him _deliberately?_"

Dumbledore leaned forward, and his face looked ashen in the dim torchlight of Snape's bedroom. He looked very old, and frail, and looking at him, Harry suddenly was reminded that even the greatest wizard of modern times was, after all, mortal and human.

"I don't know if the Transporting was deliberate, but the gang of wizards that threw the hexes at him certainly intended to cause him harm – and behind his back, too."

"Oh, my stars and garters! How despicable!"

"Indeed it was, Madam Pomfrey. I would have moved to punish the malefactors, had I known about this at the time."

"You think that his aunt found him before the start of the next school year, sir?" Harry said, working to suppress his own yawn; they had both been up the better part of the night poring over Snape's rescued memories.

"She must have done so, as he was present for the start-of-term feast in the Great Hall. We won't know the exact date until we've examined all of the memories. But that will take a great deal of time, and the memories exploded into his conscious – and ours – in no particular order. It's rather like putting together a jigsaw puzzle." He looked over at the figure of the Potions master, finally still and quiet in what looked to be authentic sleep, and then yawned himself. "And we are all in need of our beds. There's not much more we can do for him at the moment. The best we can do for him right now is to get our rest, so we can better help him when he finally does awaken."

"I suppose so."

Harry got up from his chair, yawning and stretching until his back and neck cracked. Then he let Dumbledore guide him out of Snape's chambers, back to Gryffindor tower.

"What do you suppose he's thinking about now?" Harry said as they walked up the stairs leading out of the dungeon.

Dumbledore thought a moment, his eyes seeming to go slightly vacant even as his legs kept propelling him up the stone staircase with surprising agility for a wizard of his age. "I'd say that he's doing much the same thing we are, Harry: Trying to figure out where it all began..."


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

It was the last day of June, in the year 1974, and a black-haired boy was sitting in a compartment in the Hogwarts Express, wondering if he would make it off the train in one piece.

The thin, spindly boy, looking younger than his fourteen years, sat huddled alone in his compartment on the train. Gorgeous green countryside was flying past him outside, had he troubled to turn his gaze to look to see it; but his back was pressed up against the window so he could keep a watch on the door on the compartment. His wand was in his hand, and it would stay there until he was safely with his Aunt Lobelia.

His aunt. Hah. He rather would have stayed at Hogwarts, but that wasn't possible.

He shifted to get more comfortable, but never took his eyes from the compartment door.

His mother and father were supremely mismatched, to put it mildly. It was only the fact that no one else would have had either of them, in either of their worlds, that had brought them together in the first place. They had, he had guessed, never got on well, and from what he could tell his birth seemed to have made things even worse between them. Mother loved him and tried to protect him as best she could, but Father was, at best, a drunken beast, spending his evenings at the pub and coming home reeking of sweat and bitters, taking out his frustrations on his "ugly wife" and "stupid brat" – or sometimes his "stupid wife" and "ugly brat".

One evening last January, shortly after the "ugly brat" had gone back to Hogwarts after the Yuletide holidays, his father finally went too far. But his mother lived just long enough to make sure he didn't survive her for very long, or without a great deal of pain. Her older sister took in her son, and had vowed to scrub off any Muggle residue that might exist on the lad.

In truth, she didn't have much scrubbing to do, as young Severus had already rejected anything having to do with his murderous father and his world. His father had worn his hair short; Severus wore his long, after the wizarding fashion. His father thought that wizard's robes were for ponces, and were little more than fancy nightgowns; Severus made a point of wearing his school robes around the house, and even outside in the Muggle world once he'd mastered the Disillusionment Charm.

Even so, Severus knew, without having to be told, that Aunt Lobelia resented his very existence. Every time she looked at him, she was reminded her that her beloved sister Eileen, so talented and sweet if a bit plain, was dead at the hands of a Muggle brute.

He drew up his feet beneath him on the seat, resting his chin on his knees; he was tired, as he hadn't slept well the night before. But he wasn't going to risk lying down to sleep, not even with the door to the compartment locked and warded. Not so long as any of the Marauders were within fifty feet of him.

But he thought that, just so long as he was facing the door, he could risk a sitting cat nap.

----------------------------------------------------

Carefully rising from his seat, Severus gathered up his school books and listened to the hubbub outside his compartment. The train was finally in London at King's Cross, but the conductors had not yet given anyone permission to exit the train. Most of the students were milling about the carriages, their school robes stowed away, impatient to leave.

Severus cast a Disillusionment Charm on himself. With luck, he could be off the train before Sirius Black or any of the other Marauders had spotted him. He took a deep breath, then opened the door of the compartment and joined the milling crowd.

Down the length of Severus' carriage the students swept, chattering and happy, talking about plans to meet over the summer or to take shared vacations. Nobody noticed the huddled blur among them as they all spilled out onto the platform.

Coming from the enclosed railway carriages of the train, Severus was as always struck by the sudden change in atmosphere. The carriages of the Hogwarts Express had carried within them the relatively cool, clean and dry air of the remote corner of Scotland where Hogwarts and Hogsmeade were located. In contrast, the London summer air was warm and sooty and moist, and Severus had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from giving away his presence with a loud cough.

He saw his aunt at the far end of the platform, a tall stick of a woman draped in widow's weeds, holding herself apart from the rest of the crowd as if she feared catching some sort of disease from them. She held an ebony-handled wand in one hand, which she had disguised by mounting a pair of spectacles at one end to turn it into a lorgnette. She was holding it up to her eyes and peering through the spectacles as if she were a particularly ill-humored crow.

Now was the most dangerous part. He had to remove the Disillusionment Charm and get to his aunt before the Marauders spotted him.

Severus moved halfway down the platform, then looked around himself in a wide, sweeping arc. There were several persons in the immediate area, but no signs of Black, or Potter, or of their hangers-on.

"_Finite incantatem_," he whispered.

There was a slight shimmer about him, and the blur that had surrounded him vanished. Quickly, he put away his wand. He looked around one more time –

Several shouts, from several different directions. They had apparently found him.

Severus cursed himself for not having his wand handy.

The air around Severus crackled with magic as the various spells hit home, the force of them sending him gasping to the platform floor. It looked for a moment as if he were dipped in a glowing rainbow.

Suddenly, as he lay on the warm concrete, he felt himself shimmer again, as if going under the Disillusionment Charm one more time. But he noticed that he wasn't the only thing shimmering: the platform and the crowds were now getting somewhat fuzzy, as if he were looking at them through a fogged windowpane.

There were voices, but they were less distinct as well, and fading even as the platform itself was fading:

"Didn't mean for this to happen–"

"His fault for being in the way –"

"If only Lestrange hadn't thrown that counter-hex towards us–"

"Circe's ghost, he's beginning to fade!"

The voices receded further into the foggy murk. Severus felt the concrete recede as well, as if he were floating away from it into the fog.

_So this is what it's like to die, _he thought, in a detached sort of way. _Odd, this. Shouldn't there be more pain? Or any pain? Though they say if you're hurt very badly, it overloads the nervous system, so you can't feel it anyway..._

His body started to spin as he floated through the murk. Slowly, at first, but with growing speed. He had the sense that he was traveling a very great distance.

The murk was now taking the shape of a tunnel, with Severus at one end and a point of light, small at first but growing steadily, at the other.

_I hope I don't meet my father in the afterlife_, Severus thought as he was carried along. _Mum, yes, but not him. Good-bye, life..._

The light was almost upon him. He shut his eyes tightly, braced himself for whatever lay behind the light.

He felt a burst of something – and a sudden rush like a wind –

– and found himself flat on his back on a patch of warm ground.

_This probably isn't the afterlife, then_, he told himself, right before he passed out.

------------------------------------

It was the sun that brought him around.

The warmth of it was delicious on his skin, almost painfully so; it was a stronger sun than ever he'd felt before in his life. There was a humming sound in the distance, the sound of something mechanical; other than that, the only sounds besides the beating of his heart and the whispers of his breath were coming from the wind rustling whatever plants were near him.

Before he started to get up, before he even opened his eyes, he took a quick inventory of his condition. No real pain, just a little dizziness. Strange, that – he'd been hit with a volley of hexes, any one of which should have done _something_ to him, such as shortening his legs or lengthening his nose or making him itch uncontrollably. But as far as he could tell, he was unmarked. The spells had all apparently cancelled each other out, for the most part...

Severus tried a few deep, lung-filling breaths, to see if he'd broken anything inside his body during the fall. No sudden jolts of pain occurred, so that was all right. He flexed the muscles in his arms and legs, one at a time; no pain in any of them, either. The strap of his book bag was still on his shoulder; a quick search with his hand showed that the bag and its contents had apparently survived intact, so his school trunk, shrunk to fit, probably had survived as well.

Finally, he dared to open his eyes, slowly and cautiously.

He found himself staring up into the bluest sky he had ever seen. Infinite blueness, with not a cloud to be found. Small green bushes grew all around him, their leaves rustling softly in the wind. The mechanical sound was getting louder, more distinct; Severus thought it sounded like a Muggle engine of some kind.

It was still morning, whereever he was – the sun was still climbing in the sky - but already it was getting too hot for him and his woolen robes. He tried to sit up, but a wave of nausea and dizziness overtook him, and he fell back down again.

The mechanical noise grew closer, ever closer.

And then, suddenly, it stopped.

A soft thump, then the thudding of shoes against soil. Someone was running towards him...

The face of a man, seamed and sunburned, loomed over Severus' head. The man was looking down at Severus with what appeared to be genuine concern.

"Well, I'll be a dirty bird," he said. The man's voice had a strange accent, both flat and twangy at the same time. "Are you okay, son? What happened to you?"


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

Severus looked up into the man's face, trying to force the heat- and hex-induced wooziness out of his head as he sought to study his rescuer.

The accent sounded odd, yet familiar – perhaps he'd heard it on the wireless. Whatever it was, it wasn't British. The plants didn't look right, for what he knew of Australia. And he suspected that they were too far South for it to be Canada.

_Muggle, farmer, mid-forties... American? _

_I'm in America? AMERICA?_

The thought was nearly enough to make him faint.

He slumped back towards the warm ground, but the man quickly had an arm underneath him, strong and steady, and his sharp gaze looked Severus up and down. Hazel-brown eyes glittered out from under shaggy, sun-bleached, light-brown hair in a weatherbeaten face that Severus thought must be nearly as homely as his own. He wore a long-sleeved light flannel plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows; a round something-or-other sat in one of the front pockets. A hat nearly as worn as his face sat upon his head. His breath smelt faintly of tobacco, though not, strangely enough, of tobacco smoke.

"Where...where am I?" Severus asked, in a voice that sounded like croaking frogs; the heat was making him very, very thirsty.

The man looked down at him and smiled. "In the middle of my bean field, son."

Severus swallowed a little, and blushed. "Erm, sir... but where, _exactly_, am I?" At least his voice sounded better that time.

"Exactly? Ex-_act_-ly?" The man looked off into the distance for a moment, before returning to look at Severus with a grin. "You are _exactly_ in the middle of Norway Township, _exactly_ one-and-a-half miles southwest of Bratsberg in Fillmore County, Minnesota, _exactly_ fifteen miles north of the Iowa border, more-or-less forty-three degrees forty-five minutes north of the Equator, and about ninety-one degrees forty-five minutes west of the Prime Meridian in Greenwich."

Severus felt sick at his stomach. "Oh, dear," he whispered.

"Sounds like you're a ways from home, son."

"I am." Severus' eyebrows narrowed in surprise. "How did you know?"

"Your accent, son. And the clothes you're wearing. They were kind of a hint you weren't from around here."

Severus gathered his wits, trying to figure out what to say next.

He was thousands of miles from home, with no way of getting back, and how he was going to deal with this Muggle, he hadn't a clue.

Should he just tell the truth? He didn't feel up to inventing a suitable lie. The Ministry would be upset if he didn't lie – breach of anti-Muggle security and all that. But there was something about this man that made Severus want to tell him the truth, and to hell with the Ministry.

He screwed up his courage, and made his decision:

"I'm – I'm –"

But the heat had been too much for much, and he slumped down again into a faint.

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Something soft was underneath Severus. Soft on top, yet firm underneath. And cool, blessedly cool. After some thought, he realized it was a bed with a quilted duvet or something like it. A soft down pillow was under his head.

He opened his eyes, and saw that he was in a bedroom. His outer robes had been removed, leaving him in his trousers and shirt. It felt good to be free of the robes...

His robes.

Where he kept his wand.

Severus sat straight up in the bed, his heart pumping like mad. He didn't want to try his feet, not yet, so he sat up in the bed and looked around frantically.

Ah, there on the table across from him! Someone had folded his robes neatly, found his wand in the sleeve, and set it on top of the folded pile.

Severus allowed himself to fall back against the pillow. If his wand was safe, he didn't care much about anything else for now.

He looked over to his side, where there was a bedside table. A Muggle wind-up alarm clock sat next to an electric lamp with a slightly frayed brown cloth shade. Closest to him, on a small stone coaster, was a glass filled with water and ice cubes; judging from the size of the cubes and the condensation on the coaster, it had just been placed there a few minutes ago.

Severus reached out a hand for the glass, then brought up his other hand when just the one proved to be too shaky. He brought the glass to his mouth, carefully tilting it up and in. The water felt so good on his parched throat.

He drank as much as he dared – the ice made the water almost too cold -- then, very carefully, set the glass back down on the coaster. He leaned back onto the pillow, and immediately fell back into blackness.

--------------------------

When next he woke up, it was because of a light noise.

The door to the room had opened with a wooden thunk, and very soft footsteps told of the presence of someone else in the room. Severus stayed still in the bed, his eyes firmly shut, not wanting to betray the fact that he was awake.

The soft footsteps came nearer, accompanied by a slight snuffling, almost as if someone was trying to stifle a sneeze. He heard the gurgle and clink of water and ice as his glass was refilled.

And then he heard something else:

"Peeee-you! You stink like a dirty outhouse," the Mystery Someone said, in a high-pitched, girl child's voice.

Then the soft footsteps went back out the way they came, shutting the door behind them.

Severus waited, listening for all he was worth for any sounds on the other side of the door. Nothing, for now.

As quietly as he could, he slowly got up out of bed. He still felt a bit wobbly, but better than before. He looked towards the table where his robes and wand were sitting.

Something was missing. It took him a few moments before he realized what it was.

The book bag.

_They're looking through the book bag_, he realized. A cold shiver ran through him.

Severus ran to the table and threw his robes on, then grabbed his wand. He was just about to open the door when, to his surprise, it opened for him.

The weatherbeaten man was on the other side, standing in the doorway. He had a thoughtful look on his face.

"You really are a long way from home, aren't you, son?" he said.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

Severus stared at the man like a wild animal caught in a trap. His chest rose and fell as he fought to calm himself.

"I take it you've been through my school things," he said, his eyes fixed on the man's face.

The man smiled at him, a small smile of apology. "We were trying to figure out what was going on, son, and you weren't able to tell us yourself. In fact," he said, leaning his whip-thin, whip-strong frame against the doorway, "we were about to take you to the hospital if you didn't wake up soon."

"Oh," Severus said. "That would have been bad."

The man's smile turned into a grin. "Well," he said, shifting position slightly, "it would have been complicated, that's for sure. I'm just glad you're up and around."

"What are you going to do with me?" Severus asked, his hand gripping his wand tightly.

The smile left the man's face. "Honestly, son – I don't know. I was kinda hoping you'd help us out with that." And as he spoke, the "us" he referred to suddenly appeared: He was joined at the door by two other persons, and he moved to make room for them.

One of them was a woman, though probably not as old as the man; Severus guessed she must be his wife. She was about the same height as the man, who himself was not especially tall. She had blue eyes set in a pale-china face, round-cheeked and with a pointed chin, framed by brown hair cut in a bob. She held Severus' book bag in her hands, and smiled somewhat tremulously at Severus, a smile apparently meant to be reassuring.

The other, smaller person was a girl that Severus judged to be about eight years old, obviously the daughter of the man and the woman. She had her mother's eyes, and her father's squint – though in her case it wasn't benevolent – and an unruly mop of dark-blonde hair. She looked at Severus as if he were a pile of vomit that had been left out in the sun.

The man moved into the room, and they followed. The girl's nostrils twitched as she frowned.

"By the way, this is my wife, Sarah, and my daughter, Rebecca, but we all call her Becky. Becky, Sarah, meet Severus Snape."

"Pleased to meet you, Severus," the woman said in a somewhat husky voice that didn't at all match her delicate exterior. The little girl just snorted.

"Likewise, I'm sure," replied Severus, somewhat shakily, to Mrs. Norton. He pointedly ignored Becky, and kept a tight grip on his wand.

"And I," the man continued, "am John Norton. John Bennett Norton, to be _exact_." He smiled at Severus, and Severus, despite himself, found himself giving the man a small smile in return.

The man then picked up where he had left off:

"How in the world did you wind up here?"

"I'm not sure," replied Severus. "I think I was somehow hexed here."

"Hexed?"

"I was just getting off the train at King's Cross station, coming home for the summer, when I was ambushed by some classmates. I suppose the hexes interacted with each other in an unusual way. That's the only explanation I can think of.".

"Hmmm. I thought something like that might have happened." Norton's face flexed and rippled as he thought. "Ya see, son, I was thinkin' at first that we'd have a hell of a time scrapin' up the cash for a plane ticket to England. But then we read your school books – and it doesn't seem that a plane ticket will get you where you need to go."

Severus thought a moment. "No, it wouldn't," he concluded. Then a slow smile, secret and devious, broke onto his face. "But..."

"But what, son?"

"I think I can get the Ministry to find me and take me home, sir, without you having to do a thing."

The Nortons' eyes widened at that. "How?" Norton said. "By using your magic?"

"Yes," said Severus confidently. He turned an appraising eye on Norton. "How much have you read of my school books, Mr. Norton?"

"Well, we've just skimmed the text books, but I did read the _Hogwarts Handbook for Parents and Guardians _all the way through."

"Good." Severus' smile grew wider. "Then you know that students at Hogwarts are forbidden to use magic when they're away from school during the holidays."

"Yes." A light dawned in Norton's eyes. "So they can track you by your use of magic, son?" he said.

"Yes."

"And then come and pick you up?"

"Yes."

"Even out here?"

"Almost certainly, sir. Much would depend on how well your wizarding authorities get on with ours, but I'm sure that someone would soon find me."

John Norton's homely, big-nosed face split into a wide grin. "Well, then, that's not a problem, son," he said. He reached over to give Severus a friendly shake on the shoulder; Severus tried not to flinch. "You'll just be on an exotic summer vacation for a while, is all."

Becky stuck out her tongue and made a rude noise, which got her a stern look from her mother.

"Would you to give us a demonstration, Severus?" Mrs. Norton asked, as she not-so-subtly swatted Becky on the behind. "Of your magic, that is?"

Severus took them all in with a glance. There was the sullen, pouting girl, staring daggers at him; the warm-eyed, husky-voiced mother; the friendly and kind father. They all seemed at least nominally comfortable with the idea of magic. Would they be as accepting of the reality?

"Why not?" he replied, somewhat more confidently than he felt. "Might as well get started on calling attention to myself." He turned to Mrs. Norton, and indicated with a nod of his head the book bag she was still holding. "Ma'am, if you'd set that down on the table..."

Mrs. Norton, moving as if she was carrying a rattlesnake, carefully set the book bag down onto the table where Severus' robes and wand had been placed earlier.

With the Nortons all watching, he pointed his wand at the book bag, and said "_Wingardium Leviosa!_" (He had really wanted to do this with Becky, preferably by floating her out the window and then dropping her, but he had reluctantly decided against it.)

There was a sudden rustle and squeak of leather straps. The bag rose up slowly from the table, following where Severus' wand pointed it to go.

Becky let out a squeal. Mrs. Norton gasped.

"I'll be dipped," murmured Mr. Norton, in pleased surprise. "That is the neatest trick I've seen in ages, son." He moved a step towards the bag, which was now floating some four feet above the floor of the bedroom. "Is it all right to touch it?"

"Of course."

John Norton put out a hand, all ropy and leathery, towards the floating book bag. He felt under and around the bag, approaching it as if it were a particularly skittish goat-kid. Finally, he touched it. The grin on his face could have lit up a small town.

"I'll be dipped," he repeated softly. He picked up the bag out of thin air and held it; it felt like a feather in his arms. "How do you turn that off, son?"

"Turn it off?"

"Make it stop floating."

"Oh, I just have to stop Levitating it. Like this –"

Severus moved the wand away from the book bag. It settled into Norton's arms, so suddenly that the man took a step back in surprise even though he'd been expecting it.

"I'll be a dirty bird," he said, staring at the bag.

"Is it tiring for you, Severus?" Mrs. Norton asked.

"Not really, though I wouldn't have wanted to keep holding it up for very much longer." Severus frowned in thought a moment. "Why do you ask?"

"You've been unconscious for the better part of a day, Severus. We thought you might be in a coma, until you woke up and drank some water."

"Oh." Severus pondered what he should say about that, but nothing much came to his mind. "Well, I'm feeling fine right now," he said, in as cheery a voice as he could manage.

"Feel like you could have a little lunch, son?" Norton asked.

It was at that point that Severus caught some appetizing smells wafting up from the ground floor. "Erm, yes, actually," he said, just as his stomach started to rumble rather loudly and embarrassingly.

"Then let's eat," Norton clapped Severus on the shoulder again; this time, Severus succeeded in not flinching. "Come and get it before the grease sets."

-------------------------------------

Harry had his arm underneath Professor Snape's rather bony shoulders, supporting him as Harry slowly tilted a warm mug of chicken soup to his lips.

"It's all right, Professor," Harry said, in what he hoped was a nonthreatening tone of voice. "It's all right..."

It seemed to work, as Snape parted his lips and swallowed as Harry carefully poured the soup into his mouth. His eyes, however, continued to stare sightlessly towards the ceiling; he was there, but not really there.

Harry let Snape have half of the contents of the mug, stopping when Snape seemed to balk a bit. _Is this what it's like to care for a baby_, Harry wondered idly as he set the mug down on the table nearest the bed.

"Dad..."

It was more of a wheeze than a word, but it was the first thing Snape had said in twenty-four hours. Harry's eyes widened in surprise and excitement.

Snape's glazed eyes squinted as he tried to focus them. Harry realized that Snape was expecting some sort of response.

"What is it, son?" Harry asked, and hoped that it was the right thing to say.

Snape tensed up in Harry's arms. "Not real, Dad, not real," Snape murmured brokenly, shaking his head unseeingly. "Wish you were, but you're not... not... not real..." Tears formed in Snape's coal-black eyes.

_In for a Knut, in for a Galleon_, Harry decided. "I'm very real, son," he sajd. "See?" And he gave Snape what he guessed to be a fatherly squeeze around the shoulders.

The tension went out of the Potions master's body. "Dad," Snape whispered, somewhat less sadly than before. "Thank you, Dad..."

Before Harry knew it, Snape was asleep and snoring on his shoulder.

Harry carefully, very carefully, set Snape's body back onto the pillows on the bed. Then Harry tiptoed over to the fireplace to fetch Dumbledore.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

There was a large scroll sitting half-unrolled on a table in Professor Dumbledore's office. On the scroll was sketched, in two different shades of ink by two different hands, the dateable portions of the two-month timeline for Professor Snape's recovered memories. Dumbledore's Pensieve sat next to it, the liquid shimmering within as the late-afternoon sunlight touched the basin.

Between the two of them, Harry and Dumbledore had managed to come up with a basic outline of those two months, though they would be filling in the details for some time to come. The nature of the way they received Snape's freed memories meant that the memories were disorganized and piecemeal, like shards from a glass vase. Putting everything in the proper sequence was difficult, even with the Pensieve as an aid. It had taken them the better part of three evenings to get this far, and they were about to embark on a fourth.

At the moment, Dumbledore and Harry were examining what must have been one of the very last of the suppressed memories, occurring just before the _Obliviate_ was applied. To his own surprise, Harry noted that one of the two Ministry officials in the memory was very familiar-looking.

"I've seen that person before," he told Dumbledore, pointing to the watery image of a red-haired, apple-cheeked woman in her mid-twenties standing next to Snape's Aunt Lobelia. "I know I have, though I can't remember where or how."

The headmaster bent over to look at the image. He was silent for half a moment, but then he blew a sudden puff of air through his nose, making the image ripple and distort. His snowy-white brows drew close together.

"Indeed you have, Harry. That's Molly Weasley."

------------------

Molly Weasley sat rigidly on a chair in Dumbledore's office. She looked pale and drawn, and clutched the arms of the chair as she faced Dumbledore, Poppy and Harry.

"This is something I've spent the past twenty-odd years trying to forget," she said, her eyes wet with as-yet unshed tears. "Arthur and I – we'd been married only a few years and Bill and Charlie were still small, and I was working for the Ministry on a part-time basis to get some extra money." She blinked and swallowed. "They put me on the Rescue Squad – I wasn't trained for it, but capable and loyal wizards were a bit thin on the ground at the time."

"Yes, I remember," Dumbledore nodded. "Voldemort was entering his most powerful phase."

"Yes." Molly blinked back a tear. "He'd already got Gideon and Fabian by then." She paused, taking in a deep breath. "And... that was when we found Severus..."

Molly Weasley's plump frame shook and quivered. The emotions she'd been holding back burst forth as she put her face in her hands.

"I should never have done it!" she wailed, the hands muffling her voice almost into unintelligibility. "He was better off where he was, he was _happy_... he never would have joined the Dark Lord in the first place..."

And that was all she could say before the tears overtook her entirely.

Dumbledore, Poppy and Harry all waited silently, letting Molly work her way through her grief. They sat like that for some time, each of them not moving, quietly watching the sobbing woman in their midst.

_So that's why she's always made allowances for him_, Harry thought, watching Mrs. Weasley's shoulders shake as she cried. _This explains a lot..._

It took a little while, but Molly's emotions did eventually subside. She raised up her head, looking at the the headmaster, who in turn regarded her quietly.

"Is there anything I can do for him now, Professor?" she said, her eyes and face bloated and nearly as red as her hair. "Anything at all?"

Dumbledore gave her a calm, controlled smile. "As a matter of fact, Molly," he said, leaning forward from his seat at his desk, "there is..."

------------------

The Nortons and their houseguest came slowly down the narrow interior stairs of the old farmhouse. Mrs. Norton took Severus by the hand to steady him, and he did not refuse the help, both because he didn't want to anger her and because the effects of not having eaten in twenty-four hours were starting to tell. They moved through the ground-floor parlor, then into the back of the house to the kitchen, and were all soon seated at the small, square kitchen table.

Severus' father had been estranged from his own Muggle family long before he married Severus' mother, and neither of Severus' parents associated much with their neighbors in Spinner's End. Therefore, Severus found himself sitting down to an all-Muggle meal for the very first time in his life.

He found himself, strangely enough, quite prepared to enjoy it.

Mind you, it would never be confused with what came from the Hogwarts kitchens – the Hogwarts house-elves were nearly unparalleled in their ability to turn out first-class cuisine. And some of it he'd never eaten before, at least not in that form. But it wasn't half bad, not at all. It certainly beat Aunt Lobelia's best efforts, though that was not especially difficult, as Aunt Lobelia firmly held that if something wasn't or couldn't be boiled to a gray mush, it wasn't worth eating.

As for his dinner companions, well... Becky was a bit of an irritant, but even she was better than either Aunt Lobelia or his father, so he tolerated her for her parents' sake – or rather, for the sake of Severus' maintaining their cheerful goodwill, which he had, much to his astonishment, seemed to have acquired without any effort on his part.

"Would you like to try some fried green tomatoes, Severus?" Mrs. Norton asked, indicating the contents of a plate in the middle of the table.

"Erm... all right," he said. He'd had no idea what those breaded green things were, and hadn't wanted to embarrass himself by asking. They smelled good, at any rate. He cautiously scooped three of them onto his plate, pushing aside the pork chop and mashed potatoes to make room.

"Sarah comes from the South," Mr. Norton said.

"Yes, I do," said Mrs. Norton, in a sort of long-drawn-out drawl that was subtly different from how her husband spoke, or how she had spoken upstairs in the bedroom. Her face was suddenly lit up by a smile a good deal firmer than the one she'd had earlier.

"The Southern part of the United States?"

"You got it," replied Mr. Norton, beaming. "Fried green tomatoes are right up there with pork barbecue and fried chicken as far as Southern people are concerned."

Severus nodded knowingly; he'd never heard of pork barbecue, but fried chicken made regular appearances on the Hogwarts tables, and it was one of his favorite foods. He steeled himself and prodded one of the slices with his fork.

"You best eat it while it's still hot, honey," urged Mrs. Norton, seeing Severus looking somewhat dubiously at the tomatoes on his plate. "Tastes best that way. Here, like this." She used the side of her fork to cut one of her own tomato slices into bite-size pieces, then popped one of the pieces into her mouth.

Severus imitated her – and found out that he liked fried green tomatoes.

"They _are_ good," he said, once he'd finished swallowing the first piece. He soon polished off the rest of the tomatoes on his plate, and even went back for seconds.

Mr. and Mrs. Norton smiled. Becky made a scowl that was all but audible.

"So, Severus," Mr. Norton said after he'd consumed his pork chop, "what kind of a cover story do we need to come up with for you?"

Severus paused in mid-chew. "Cover story?" he replied, once he'd finished swallowing his piece of tomato.

"To explain you to the neighbors, son." Mr. Norton grinned. "Be a pain in the patootie for you to run around Memory Charming them every time you went out the door."

"How do you know about – oh."

"Yupper, it's on page fourteen of the _Handbook_. 'Memory Charms – The Last Line of Defence'. We can't be doing that to Mrs. Halvorson," Mr. Norton said, indicating her house next door with a jerk of his head, "her memory's bad enough as it is."

Severus sat silently for a few moments. He looked out the kitchen window in the direction Mr. Norton had motioned. A small, trim white house could be seen through the framing of the apple trees in the Nortons' back yard. He thought he could see the shadow of a moving form inside.

"What do you suggest, sir?" he said quietly.

Mr. Norton leaned back in his chair, its wooden limbs protesting softly as he did so. The grin was still on his face.

"Well, son, we just happen to be in luck. See, about a couple of miles up the road, pert' near up until about two weeks ago, there was a commune, the 'Celestial Fields' commune I think it was called. Full to the brim with hippies. Know what 'hippies' are, Severus?"

"Erm... no, sir."

"Hippies are young city kids who think they're mystical and magical when for the most part they're just lazy, though some of them are good enough people and they have some good ideas about farming. Mean well, anyway. Folks who call themselves names like 'Moonchild' and 'Earth Daughter' and 'Rainbow', and who don't dress or act too much different from you, at least at first glance. They were trying the back-to-the-land lifestyle but they could only stick it out about six months before they left for parts unknown."

Severus anticipated what Mr. Norton was going to say next. "You're thinking that I could pass for one of these 'hippies', sir?"

"You got it, son. If anyone asks, you were one of the commune members that got left behind, and you're just waiting here for someone to come get you. That should take care of about eighty percent of the questions you get."

"Ah." Severus thought a moment. "You say that they dressed somewhat like me? Do you think they were really witches and wizards?"

Mr. Norton burst out in a hearty chuckle. "Doubt it, son. If they could do magic, they'd have been able to do a better job at living off the land. No, they just confused pot smoke with fairy dust, is all."

Severus had no idea what 'pot smoke' was – were these 'hippies' perhaps Potions brewers? – but he didn't feel like asking at the moment.

"It would work out really well, Severus," chimed in Mrs. Norton, in her rather pleasingly hoarse drawl. "You could even keep your name – people would assume it was a hippie name."

"It's _stupid_ enough to be one," muttered Becky in a voice so low Severus almost didn't hear what she'd said.

"Behave yourself, Becky, " Mr. Norton said, though without any real bite. "One thing, son: though they did wear flowing garments like yours, I don't think you'd want to be wearing those heavy wool robes during summer."

"I can cast Cooling Charms," Severus replied.

"What about Un-Stinky Charms?" Becky giggled maliciously, in her high-pitched eight-year-old's voice. "That robe _reeks_."

Severus slowly turned to face Becky. He wanted to give her one hell of a tongue-lashing, but he did not say a word. Instead, he just looked at her silently until the smirk she was wearing vanished and she looked away.

"Does anyone want some raspberry pie?" Mrs. Norton asked, in a somewhat strained voice.

"I do!" replied Mr. Norton and Becky as one.

"So do I," said Severus; he'd had raspberry jam, and the idea of raspberry pie was too enticing to resist. In addition, he approved of anything that would stop up Becky's mouth, even if only for a little while.

The relief in Mrs. Norton's voice was palpable. "Oh, good. Then I'll go cut some up for us."

She got up from her chair and moved to the counter where a pie was cooling under a mesh netting of some sort. Five minutes later, Severus found out that he really liked raspberry pie, too.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

After lunch, Severus, robes and all, went out with Mr. and Mrs. Norton and Becky to look at the Nortons' property, but not before casting a Cooling Charm on himself. It was time for the second milking of the cows – they milked the cows three times a day on the Norton farm – and the Nortons thought it would be good for Severus to see what that was all about.

"Fifty acres of soybeans, plus a five-acre house plot with apple trees in the backyard, walnut trees in front, strawberry beds, a truck patch, a hay field, strawberry, blueberry and raspberry bushes, some chickens and a rooster for eggs et cetera, two cows for milk-cheese-butter-et cetera. It ain't much, son," Mr. Norton said as he strode out with Severus and Mrs. Norton to one of the outbuildings on the property, "'specially compared with the bigger farms around here. And the beans don't bring in as much money as they should, which is why I'm diversifying some. But the beans feed the cows and the chickens, especially in the winter months, and it's home."

The young wizard cast his eyes about the farmstead as they walked. It looked neat, well-kept; he wondered if the cows were responsible for that, at least the grass part.

"Do you use a lot of machinery, sir?"

"Machinery? Yah, we use a bit. Coupla tractors for the beans and for mowing the hay and such, plus the combine and milking gear..." Norton glanced over at Severus, noted the blank expression on the boy's face. "Sounds like this is all going over your head."

"Beg pardon, sir?"

"He means that he's not sure this is making any sense to you, Severus," Mrs. Norton supplied, in that smokily-husky voice of hers, as they walked past the largest of the outbuildings over to where a pair of brown cows sat in the shade of the apple trees. The trees weren't very tall, but then again, neither were the cows.

"There's not much call for machinery in our world," the boy said. "In fact, it's illegal to own most Muggle artifacts."

"Is that so? Well, that's a heck of a way to run a railroad." Mr. Norton turned towards the cows, who had lifted their heads at the approach of the three humans and now were looking with a placid sort of inquiry at the black-clad stranger in their midst. "Ava, Marilyn, come on now, it's time for Number Two." The cows blinked their round dark eyes, then lowed softly as they rose to follow him into the barn.

"They listen to him," Mrs. Norton whispered to Severus, "but not to me or Becky. I think they're jealous of other females." Becky rolled her eyes and snorted, but said nothing.

----------------------------------------

Severus soon, to his great surprise, found himself more or less successfully milking a cow.

Mr. Norton had pulled him over to the milking stand where Ava – or was it Marilyn? – was tethered, washed his hands and washed the cow's udder, then grabbed a sanitized metal bucket and showed him what to do. Ava stood placidly as he fumbled around and got the first teat's squeezings all over himself; Becky had laughed, but then he muttered a quick _Evanesco_ and his robes were suddenly milk-free, which shut her up. And he managed to direct the rest of Ava's milk straight into the galvanized tin bucket, which Mrs. Norton promptly took to the large metal cylinder in the corner.

"What's that?" Severus asked, watching as Mrs. Norton poured the milk inside of it.

"It's a pasteurizer, son."

"Ah," Severus replied, in that tone of voice which was shorthand for "...and now I know as much as I did before about it, which was nothing."

Mr. Norton grinned, and looked at the boy with a speculative gaze that, strangely enough, reminded him both of Hagrid and of Dumbledore. "Heats the milk up enough to kill any germs it might have."

"I see."

"We get enough milk and butter and cream every day for our daily needs and then some," supplied Mrs. Norton. "The extra goes into making cheeses, most of which we sell at the farmers' markets locally and in Rochester, and sometimes even up in the Cities."

"'The Cities?'"

"Oh, that's what we call Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the two biggest cities in our state. They straddle the Mississippi about a hundred or so miles to the north of us. We get up there a couple times a year, especially for the State Fair so we can check out the new farm machinery for sale on Machinery Hill."

"Ah."

Mrs. Norton smiled, a refined echo of her husband's earlier grin. "Don't worry, Severus. It'll all start to make sense eventually."

Mr. Norton finished milking the other cow – neither cow would let Becky or Mrs. Norton anywhere near them. It took him a lot less time than it had taken Severus, and he'd avoided getting any milk on himself.

When the milking was done, Mrs. Norton pulled four large square wooden baskets from a shelf on the wall and handed them out. Each of the large wooden baskets was filled with several smaller baskets.

"We're going to the berry patches next," she explained to Severus, as he stared quizzically at the basket in his hand.

"Yupper," Mr. Norton averred. "As for the cows, we'll come back around nine o'clock tonight and get the last milking in."

They all walked out with the cows into the yard, Mr. Norton leading the way, but with Severus at his side.

"We get a gallon and a half from each of them per milking," Mr. Norton said as they walked towards the part of the property where the berry bushes were located, "which is enough to make a pound and a half of cheese – we do Cheddar mostly, but we also have some soft cheeses like Neufchatel – which works out to eight pounds a day after the household milk's subtracted. We sell it at $1.25 a pound wholesale, $2.00 a pound retail, and it brings in about four thousand dollars a year for us." He gave Severus a sidelong grin. "Not a heckuva lot, but it helps, and it gives me something to do in the winter."

"Is this a busy time of year for you, sir?" Severus

"Kinda, though it won't get super-busy until around about August and September, when the apples and beans and walnuts start to be ready for picking. The soybeans just need to be checked for weeds more than anything right now. The strawberries are pretty much done for the year – they're at the stage where we only need to check 'em for ripe berries every other day, and we did that yesterday – but the raspberries are coming on strong right now, and the blueberries are starting to come along."

"They certainly are," Mrs. Norton chimed in. Her short brown hair, straight as a stick, blew around her face, gleaming like burnished wood where it caught the afternoon sun. "John honey, Becky and I will go over to the blueberry patch, okay? You and Severus can work the raspberries."

Mr. Norton grinned yet again. "I was just about to suggest that, Sarah. Come along, son," he said to Severus, and started towards a stand of waist-high green bushes with small red dots on them. "Now the key to raspberry picking, Severus, is not to pull too hard..."

-------------------------------------------------------

The discovery came to Harry in the middle of Quidditch practice, and when it did come, it nearly knocked him off his broom.

"Harry!" Ginny called out from the ground, where she was suited up to take over as Seeker in case Harry was incapacitated. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Harry called out, righting himself just in time to avoid a Bludger. And a good thing, too: Practice Bludgers were made out of rubber and not metal, but nobody in his right mind wanted to be hit by one. (Well, Uric the Oddball had a fondness for bouncing rubber practice Bludgers off his forehead, but no one ever said that he was in his right mind.)

The rest of the practice progressed without incident, but Ginny noticed that Harry was distracted and not playing like his usual self. Granted, he was so good that even when distracted, he was the best player on the pitch, but still...

She also noticed that he was off his broom and off the pitch in record time. This wasn't typical at all of him – usually he lingered after practice, discussing strategy and plans for the next match. Something was up.

Moving quietly, Ginny beat Harry into the changing rooms and made a point of getting into her regular robes as fast as she could. She was going to follow Harry and get to the

bottom of this.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven**

Severus and Mr. Norton stood side by side in the warm July sun, stooped over the raspberry bushes on their stakes. They worked quietly together for the most part in a silence that the young wizard found rather agreeable. It helped that Becky and her glare were both well away from them.

Picking raspberries was indeed fairly delicate work. The trick was to have a light hand; if the berries were ripe, just a touch would dislodge them. If you had to actually tug on them, they weren't ripe anyway and you'd likely damage them. But Severus was neat-handed by nature; he had won much praise from Professor Sprout and Professor Slughorn for his dexterity with plants and potions ingredients. He could also work quickly; he soon had four of the smaller baskets filled in the time Mr. Norton was able to fill three.

"Well, you're doing pretty good out here, son," Mr. Norton said, as he stopped to stretch his back.

"Thank you, sir." Severus could hear the slight pops and ticks Mr. Norton's raw-boned body made as the joints and muscles relaxed. He wondered if his own body would sound like that in a few decades.

"Do you do much of this where you're from, Severus?"

"A bit. We have Herbology and Potions classes, and they often require fresh ingredients. And my mother grew herbs in her garden –"

Severus found himself unable to speak, unable even to keep picking.

_Mum would have loved this place_. _Absolutely loved it. _

"You all right, son?"

"I'm fine," Severus said, somewhat loudly. "I'm fine," he repeated, this time in a normal voice.

Mr. Norton nodded, and the two of them went back to picking raspberries.

A fifth of Severus' small baskets was filled, and then a sixth, without him saying another word. He kept his eyes and attention resolutely fixed on the raspberry bushes.

Even so, he thought he could feel Mr. Norton's gaze on him, a gaze with a force like that of Dumbledore's, almost as warm and penetrating as the Minnesota sun overhead. He guessed that Mr. Norton wanted very badly to ask him something, something dreadfully personal.

Finally, it came: "Do you have any family back home, son?"

Severus didn't look up from the bushes. "No."

There was an "Oh," from Mr. Norton, quiet and uncharacteristically subdued. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be," Severus said. He tried to keep the tremor out of his voice, but failed. "You didn't kill them."

Mr. Norton said nothing in reply; his only response was a slight, sharp inhalation of air, almost but not quite a gasp. After that, it was suddenly so quiet, or at least seemed that way, that Severus could hear the blood pulsing in his ears.

The young wizard stared straight ahead, carefully avoiding looking at Mr. Norton. He waited grimly for the interrogation that he was sure would come, the questions he didn't want to face because of the memories they'd bring in their wake.

He wasn't sure he could bear it.

He wanted to placate the Nortons, he really did. He wanted to keep them feeling friendly towards him. But Severus had sudden visions of stomping off back to the house, collecting his things, and trying to Apparate home – or at least away – even though he was a good two years at the earliest from getting his Apparition license.

But Mr. Norton said nothing more for the rest of the time that they were there.

----------------------------------------------------

It was nearly three o' clock by the time Severus and the Nortons were finished picking berries. The four of them trooped back to the milking barn, sweaty and content; even Severus had worked up a mild sweat despite the Cooling Charm.

The berry baskets were set down on a long wooden work table of some sort. Mrs. Norton had fetched a cart that held a set of flat metal trays on shelves. "We'll put most of the berries on these trays to be frozen," she explained to Severus, who was looking at them somewhat dubiously. "First we go through them and get rid of any bad ones, then freeze them flat like this, so they don't touch each other. Then when they're frozen solid, we'll put them into bags for storage and for sale."

"Ah, I see – so they won't all freeze into a solid clump."

"Exactly," said Mrs. Norton, giving him a sunny smile. "What we don't freeze, we turn into jams and pies."

Severus nodded in silent approval; this would be how Slughorn would have processed fruits and other soft-bodied potions ingredients he intended to keep without drying. Except, of course, that Slughorn would not be using Muggle refrigeration to do this...

"Mrs. Norton?"

"Yes, Severus?"

"May I try a Freezing Charm on one of the trays?"

Mrs. Norton started to say something, then paused. "Oh, right – that would be just like your Cooling Charm, only stronger, wouldn't it?"

"Exactly."

"Go ahead, son," said Mr. Norton, who at that moment had just filled up one tray with raspberries. "Try it on this one," he said, carefully setting the tray on the work table.

Severus pulled out his wand from the inside pocket of his robe. He pointed it at the tray, then looked up at the Nortons, who had all crowded around the tray, eager to witness what happened next.

"You might want to keep back a bit," he said. Mr. Norton nodded, and took two steps away from the tray; Becky and Mrs. Norton followed suit.

Severus returned his attention to the tray. "_Frigidio!_" he cried out.

A blue blast of cold energy shimmered from the wand, hitting the tray and enveloping it; then, as fast as it had come, it dissipated. In its wake was a frosty tray of perfectly-frozen raspberries.

"I _will_ be a dirty bird," said Mr. Norton. He grinned as he looked at Severus. "How many times can you do that, son?"

"As often as you like."

"Sarah, Becky, get the bags," Mr. Norton said, turning back to his wife and daughter, who even at that moment were bringing over a pile of clear plastic bags and what Severus guessed was some sort of sealing machine. "Let's see if we can't get these taken care of before it's time for supper."

----------------------------------

"That was wonderful, honey," John Norton said to his wife, setting his fork down on his empty plate with a satisfied sigh. He had just put away two large slices of chicken pie and was feeling the need to loosen the buckle on his belt.

"Thank you, dear," beamed Mrs. Norton, her blue eyes dancing, and flashed her husband a pearly-white smile.

Severus would have echoed Mr. Norton's sentiments, but his mouth was full of chicken pie. So he merely smiled and nodded.

"And_ I_ made the corn bread," Becky announced with pride.

"That you did, honey, that you did," Mr. Norton said, reaching over to tousle Becky's mop of hair. She giggled slightly, but didn't move away.

"Would you like help with the dishes, Ma'am?" Severus asked, once he'd swallowed the mouthful of chicken and washed it down with some chilled milk. (He was rather surprised to see milk on the table, and even more surprised that it was being drunk by the adults as well as Becky. Must be a farm thing, he decided.)

"That would be sweet of you, Severus," Mrs. Norton replied.

"Then Becky and I'll go out and check on the truck patch," Mr. Norton announced. "The first of the mid-season tomatoes are just about ripe."

"Check on the cabbage, too," Mrs. Norton advised. "That should be getting close to ready."

"All right, dear. Come along, Becky."

---------------------------------------

"Well, Severus," Mrs. Norton asked as she started to gather up the dishes, "what do you think of life on the farm?"

Severus considered the question for what he hoped wasn't too long of a time. "It's... interesting," he said at last, passing his plate and glass to her.

"'_Interesting_'," Mrs. Norton said, a small smile on her face. "Is that like the old Chinese curse? 'May you live in interesting times'?"

"Oh, no, not like that at all. It's like home in some ways, but then it's not."

"In what ways?"

"Well..."

This was going to be difficult.

Severus had hoped to avoid talking about his parents again – it was why he'd offered to help with the dishes, instead of going out again with Mr. Norton – but it looked as if that wouldn't be possible.

He took a deep breath, counted to ten, and then spoke.

"I was brought up in a mixed household – my mother was a witch, my father was a Muggle. So we used some Muggle things, and were familiar with other things."

Just as he thought she would, Mrs. Norton picked up on his use of the past tense. "Your parents are no longer living, Severus?"

Severus paused before answering. "No." He looked out the window above the kitchen sink, and forced himself to look at the herbs in the window box, in the hope of staving off tears. Rosemary, basil, dill...

"I'm sorry, honey." Her hand lightly touched his shoulder. "I was wondering why you'd mentioned the Ministry coming to get you, and not your folks."

"My father stabbed my mother to death when I was at school," Severus said forcefully, in order to get the words out before he'd lost the nerve to say them. "She couldn't save herself, but she could hex him to death in return."

"Oh, honey!"

Her arms were about him, quickly yet gently, and he found himself pressed face-first into her bosom, warm and soft and comforting.

It had been easier than he'd thought it would be.

Easier.

Easier...

Before he could stop himself, he was crying, sobbing the way he hadn't allowed himself to cry, not when Professor Slughorn came to him with the news, certainly not around Aunt Lobelia, not even when he was alone in the Hogwarts lavatories late at night with no one to witness him.

He held onto Mrs. Norton and hugged her the way he had once hugged his own mother. The sobs came out as half-words, incoherent cries for his Mum, good-byes to her, high thin wails mercifully muffled by Mrs. Norton's warm softness. And Mrs. Norton stroked his back, rocking him gently, the way his mother had done when he was little or when he was upset.

Once the first flood of tears was done, it felt good. Good to have said it. Good to have grieved. Good to have said good-bye to his mother at last.

Slowly, as if waking from a very bad dream, he lifted his face up to look at Mrs. Norton. "Please don't tell Becky," he said, his voice steady even as the tears still glistened on his cheeks. "You can tell Mr. Norton, but please don't tell Becky. You can tell her they're dead, but not why or how."

"I understand, Severus." Mrs. Norton brushed the hair out of his face. "I understand."

------------------------------------

Harry had sprinted up every single staircase on the way to Dumbledore's office; he was all but panting by the time he came within sight of the gargoyles. "Filibuster," he whispered, and the guardians moved to allow him entry. He ran through the doorway as if he had been shot from a cannon.

He was definitely too distracted to notice that Ginny Weasley had followed him, at a discreet distance, the entire way. She watched him disappear into Dumbledore's office, then turned to go back the way she had come.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

That night, after helping with the third and final milking of the day, Severus sat at the large table in his bedroom – at least, it was the room they put him in when they found him, so he guessed it was his for now.

His wand sat in a pencil holder on the table, the wand's tip pointing upwards and glowing from the _Lumos_ spell he'd cast with it. The window was open, but there was a metal mesh covering it. The mesh was loose enough to allow air to enter, but tight enough to keep out the bugs he could hear outside, chirping and screeching softly and not-so-softly to one another in the warm summer night. The air felt a bit wetter than it had during the day; according to the man on the wireless (Mr. Norton had a small radio with him when he milked the cows), rain was expected tomorrow.

Severus was working intently on a Potions essay for one of Slughorn's extra-credit classes; he pushed his quill along briskly, making small, cramped words that didn't take up much space. He wanted to cram as much into each page of parchment as he could, as he wasn't sure how long it would be before he was found. And it would likely be many weeks after that before Aunt Lobelia would consent to take him to Diagon Alley to get more; she would probably be so furious at him for disappearing that she'd shut him up in the attic until September came around.

Mrs. Norton had asked him if he'd like any help with the essay, and he had all he could do not to laugh as he, politely yet firmly, said no. Though he had to admit that it was a good thought of hers, to lend him the American Muggle dictionary – Webster's Third New International, as big as a paving stone and nearly as heavy – as his spelling wasn't quite perfected yet. It was somewhat disconcerting to see the American usage of words like "favor" and "theater" and "center", but once he knew what to look for, he was able to retranslate it back into proper British English.

The essay dealt with multi-part potions – those potions whose effects weren't triggered unless another, normally innocuous item was present. Drink the potion by itself, nothing would happen; drink it and then consume the thing that would react with it, and then something would happen – usually bad for the drinker, as most of these potions were poisons intended not to be activated until well after the poisoner had left the scene.

It was N.E.W.T.-level material, which he normally wouldn't be studying as a fourth-year – in fact, technically he wouldn't even be studying for his O.W.L.s until the latter half of his fourth year – but he wanted to show Slughorn what he was made of. He wanted to earn those pats on the back the tubby old Head of Slytherin was prone to bestow on his very best students. He, the son of Eileen Prince and a Muggle bastard of a father, was going to do whatever he could to be the best Potions student ever to pass through Hogwarts' doors.

Sitting at the wooden table, scratching away with his quill in the narrow beam of light of the _Lumos_ spell, Severus was struck by how normal everything felt. How comfortable it all was, even though so much of it was strange and new to him, half-blood upbringing or no.

He had never felt this relaxed while studying at home, not when he was constantly on alert to try and forestall the thing that had finally happened when he was away and powerless to prevent it. He sometimes felt this relaxed in the school library when Pince was around to make sure that no nonsense occurred; or maybe the Slytherin common room, but only when he was with his immediate circle of associates.

_Hmmm. Was "mithridate" spelt with two or three i's? Better check in Webster's... ah, two._

Speaking of feeling comfortable, he wondered what it was that led him to let his guard down enough to blurt out his most shocking life secret to a complete stranger.

_Perhaps_, he felt as he wrote in quick, furious, tiny strokes, _maybe... maybe it was because she was a complete stranger. (Well, not complete, not any more, but still...) I've heard it said that it's easier to confess things to people you know you'll never see again. Yes, that must be it..._

He got to the end of a paragraph, looked over what he had written. It would do for now. He'd see about making any corrections in the morning. For now, it was time to go to bed, to be ready for whatever chores the Nortons had lying in wait for him tomorrow. Just as he was going to earn pats from Slughorn, he would earn his keep with the Nortons. The more chores he did, the more he could help them, the happier they'd be. The happier they were, the more willing they'd be to keep him around for the short time until the Ministry people arrived to collect him and he could get back to his real life.

He put away his school books, took off his robes, and crawled into bed. Five minutes later, he was sound asleep.

-------------------------

Severus awoke to the sound of rain. It was hitting the windowpane in large drops, so loudly and forcefully that he thought at first it was hail.

_What wretched weather_, he thought, lifting his head from the pillow to look at it streaming down. _And poor Mr. Norton having to go out in it to milk those cows..._

A thought came to Severus. He might be able to do something about that.

He got dressed and ran down the stairs to the kitchen, just as Mr. Norton was putting on a heavy old macintosh that had seen better days. An equally worn umbrella was sitting on the kitchen table. The clock on the wall above the stove read a quarter to six, so the sun had to have come up already, but it was hard to tell with all the rain coming down outside.

Mr. Norton looked up and smiled. "You don't have to come out with me, son. Rainin' cats and dogs out there."

"I can help a bit with that, sir," the boy said. He turned his head towards the umbrella. "May I try something?"

"Go right ahead."

The young wizard already had his wand in hand. Pointing it at the umbrella, he said "_Repello Pluvia!_" A red beam of energy shot from the wand, wrapping itself around the umbrella; then, as fast as it had appeared, it was gone, leaving no apparent trace of itself.

"What does that do, son?" Mr. Norton asked as he stepped into a pair of rubber rain boots.

"It repels rainwater, sir. When you use the umbrella, not only will the rain not come near you, whatever rain has already fallen will rush away from you, so you'll be walking on dry ground."

"Well, I'll be dipped." Mr. Norton reached out a hand to touch the umbrella. "It doesn't feel any different."

"It shouldn't, sir. But you'll notice it when you go outside."

"Let's find out."

Mr. Norton picked up the umbrella by the handle and took it off the table. He then crossed to the kitchen door, looking at the wind-lashed rain hitting the windowpanes. He opened the umbrella, holding it in front of him like a bullfighter holding a cape, as he went to open the door.

"I'll be a dirty bird!"

The rain, which had been pounding on the glass on the kitchen door, suddenly vanished once the umbrella was within a foot of the door.

Carefully, cautiously, Mr. Norton put his free hand to the door knob and turned it, pulling the door open. The rain-free area bulged out a good foot in front of him, pushing the water aside. He stepped all the way outside, down the concrete steps to the path, and found himself in the center of a liquid-free sphere about eight feet in diameter.

"I _will_ be a dirty bird, son," he said softly.

"May I come out and help you, sir?" Severus said in a voice that was nearly a shout, so as to be heard over the pouring rain.

"Help milk the cows? Sure, sure. They like you, son. Hold on a sec." He moved back onto the steps so that Severus could step straight from the kitchen into the sphere of dryness. "You know, I really could get used to this," he said, grinning from ear to ear. "Come on, Severus, let's go wake up the girls."

They walked to the cow barn as if they were walking inside of a giant transparent ball. There was water all around them, in the air and on the ground, but the effect of the spell meant that whereever they – or rather, the umbrella Mr. Norton held – went, the water would be pushed away from them, leaving the ground perfectly dry under their feet.

With his free hand, Mr. Norton reached inside his mackintosh and pulled out a small round tin. "Chewing tobacco, son," he said in response to Severus' raised eyebrow. "It's a bad habit, but it beats cigarettes and Sarah doesn't mind so long as I don't do it in the house." With the ease of long practice, he opened the tin one-handed and popped a small pinch of finely-cut tobacco into his mouth. "Got into the habit during Korea – nicotine makes good aspirin when you're on the front line and got nothing else."

"You were in Korea, sir?"

Mr. Norton's smile was slightly distorted by the lump of tobacco in his mouth. "I sure was, son, but to fight, not to sight-see, unfortunately. That'd be over twenty years ago, now. I was eighteen and in the Marines." His eyes took on a slightly misty look. "Did most of my growing-up over there, then came back to Dad's farm when it was all done."

"I see."

Once in the barn, Mr. Norton set the umbrella down on the work table by the door. "Well, son, that was so much fun I almost hope it keeps raining."

"It is rather useful, isn't it?"

"Sure is."

Ava and Marilyn had awakened when the door opened; they sat in their stalls, their round eyes placidly taking in the sight of the two humans. A handful of barn cats, mousers that the Nortons kept in the barn to keep down the rodent population, were curled up and dozing near the cows, their prowlings done for the night. They felt the rustle of straw as the cows got up, and were awake on the instant, skittering away from the cows in case one of them rolled too near.

"I'm kinda glad to have you out here, son," Mr. Norton confessed as they led the cows to their milking stanchions. "It takes a while to milk 'em by hand, and they don't like the girls to come near them."

"Is there any other way to do it?"

"Well, I have an old eletric-powered milking machine that can do it in five to ten minutes, but one of the udder cups broke on it a few weeks ago."

_And you don't have the money to fix it_, Severus mentally supplied. _Yet you were ready to scrape up whatever pence you could find for an aeroplane ticket to get me home..._

Severus stood back as Mr. Norton tied the cow's halter's to the stanchions. "May I see it?" he said.

Mr. Norton turned to look at him. "Gonna try another spell?"

"With your permission, yes."

Mr. Norton gave him a grin. "Might as well – it's not working anyway." He gestured towards a spot over by one of the work tables. There was a large box with the word "DeLaval" on it, and the box had all sorts of rubber and metal tubes and things sticking out of it. "Knock yourself out, son."

"Thank you, sir."

Severus pulled his wand out of his sleeve, then walked over to the strange device. He waved the wand with a grand flourish, pointed it at the device, and called out "_Reparo!_"

A thin jet of light came from the wand and hit the contraption. There was a shuffling inside of the box, as if the parts were rearranging themselves. Mr. Norton came over to look for himself.

"Well, I'll be..." He lifted one of the tubes and tapped it. "It's good as new!" He looked at Severus and grinned. "Thank you, son!"

"You're welcome, sir."

"You sure you don't want to stick around here? We could use a good mechanic in town."

The young wizard felt oddly pleased. "I wish I could, sir," he said – and was surprised to find that he really did mean it, in a fashion. "But Aunt Lobelia would have my hide if I did."

"Gotcha, son." Mr. Norton carefully pulled the milking machinery from its box. "Let's see if we can't get this cleaned up and ready to go..."

Severus was somewhat surprised that Mr. Norton hadn't asked him about Aunt Lobelia. But then he remembered the incident in the raspberry patch yesterday, and how quiet Mr. Norton had become afterwards. The man was no doubt trying to be tactful. He wasn't going to bring up something that he thought might hurt Severus in any way.

Mr. Norton didn't take long to get the milking machine sterilized and ready to go. (It helped that Severus sped up the process with a Purity Charm.) And as it turned out, Mr. Norton was right: what was an hour-or-more job done by hand took only ten minutes for each cow when the machine was used. Mr. Norton was even able to step outside to discreetly spit out his wad of chewing tobacco – "I never spit in the barn," he explained – and rinse his mouth out with a small bottle of Coca-Cola he retrieved from the small ice box in the milking parlor.

He offered Severus another bottle, and the boy accepted; they sat together on top of one of the work tables, drinking their Cokes, listening to the beat of the rain on the roof, the rasp and whoosh of the milking machine, and the voice of the radio presenter coming over the wireless, doing incessant and relentlessly cheery advertisements for his sponsor – "Bill Diehl for Oldsmobile! Wally McCarthy's Lindahl Olds! Freeway 494 and Penn Avenue South! Come on out and enjoy the free hot dogs here..."

"I'm sorry about yesterday afternoon, sir," Severus said, looking through the open barn door at the rain pouring down outside.

"Huh? Oh, that." Mr. Norton looked at him, a small, sad smile on his face. "Nothing to worry about, son. But if you ever want to talk about it, I'm here."

"Thank you, sir." Severus took another sip from his Coke. "I will, right now, so long as you promise not to tell Becky."

"I promise, Severus."

The young wizard leaned back and took a deep breath. "My mother was a witch, but my father was a Muggle. They fought constantly. One evening, when I was away at school –" Severus paused for a moment to fight back the tremor that had appeared in his voice "– my father stabbed her and left her for dead. With her dying breath, she cast a curse on him. It took him a week to die."

Mr. Norton didn't reach out to hug Severus, as Mrs. Norton had, and Severus was glad of that; he wasn't sure how he'd feel about being hugged by an adult male. But instead of a hug, Severus found one of Mr. Norton's large, work-worn hands atop one of his own. Mr. Norton gave the boy's hand a gentle squeeze.

"So that's why you're living with your aunt."

"Yes."

Mr. Norton was silent for a long time after that. He sat with Severus, his hand on the boy's hand, looking out at the pouring rain.

---------------------

It was all Harry could do to keep from skipping as he ran down the corridor. Dumbledore had agreed with him about his idea – and was going to try it tomorrow afternoon! If everything went well, Snape would be up and deducting house points in less than a week.

He climbed in through through the portrait-hole, and the Fat Lady didn't chide him for his lateness; the portraits all knew about Harry's working with Dumbledore to help Professor Snape.

"Took you long enough," a familiar voice said, once he was through.

Harry looked up. Ginny Weasley was sitting on the red couch in the Gryffindor common room, a cup of tea in hand. She was also giving him That Stare. The one that, Harry knew from experience, translated into English as "You'd better tell me everything or you are in Big Trouble."

"Come have some tea," she said, patting the couch cushion next to her, "and tell me all about it."


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine**

A thought had been sitting in the back of Severus' mind all through that morning, throughout the morning chores, once he realized what day it was.

_I was hexed late on Sunday afternoon, then transported to a place six hours behind Greenwich Time, where it was still late Sunday morning...slept until the next day, Monday morning, woke in time for lunch, did chores, had supper, did more chores, then slept... so today's Tuesday._

_The question is – do the Nortons attend any churches on Sundays? And will they want me to go to church with them?_

The thought of walking into a church put creases in Severus' gut. He would have almost preferred to be left in the company of Sirius Black.

Centuries ago, the ancestors of the church leaders burned a large number of his mother's people at the stake; contrary to what the wizarding history books implied, the Flame-Freezing Charm hadn't been invented in time to save most of them. The Nortons had to have known about the burnings from their own Muggle histories.

Did they themselves attend any churches? Severus doubted that, as he didn't think, from what little he knew of Muggle church services, that Mr. Norton would have had time to milk the cows by hand, attend a service, and get out in time to get on his tractor and rescue a boy who had fallen from the sky into his bean-field.

But the possibility ate away at him.

Mrs. Norton and Becky had got up about the same time as had Severus and Mr. Norton. They had looked after the chickens and got the eggs, then Mrs. Norton drove them to the nearest large town, Rushford, to do some shopping. While at Rushford, they also planned to drop off some of their cheeses with the local grocers, as well as with an Italian restaurant; the Café de Napoli in Rushford used their ricotta and their butter, and in return gave them fifteen dollars a week, as well as a five-course Italian supper for them to take home.

Having finished milking the cows, Mr. Norton showed Severus how they prepared their cheeses. It was a time-consuming process – skimming the rennet-and-yogurt-inoculated milk culture that was started the night before and all that – which is why Mr. Norton generally only did it a couple of times a week. The one really good thing was that at a certain point everything had to be allowed to sit undisturbed for at least two hours while they did other things like pick berries and tend the truck patch.

But it looked interesting, and Severus took to it, getting a feel (literally, by dipping a well-sanitized finger into the vat) for when the milk would finally set into a proper, cuttable curd, when to get the curds separated from the whey, and just how tightly to set the salted curds into the cheese presses. (And he was looking forward to making ice cream later, with the cream they'd skimmed the night before.)

"We'll turn the whey into ricotta later this week, and what's left over from that becomes feed for the chickens and the cows," Mr. Norton explained as they left the barn to get some lunch. The rain had stopped for the nonce, though it was still somewhat cloudy; the summer sun peeking through the clouds was still strong enough to cause steam to rise up from the grass, making it almost foggy up to near shin level.

"You don't waste anything at all here, do you, sir?" Severus said.

"Nope, son, we don't." Mr. Norton smiled as he opened the screen door. "Everything has a use and a purpose here. Even the funny-looking things."

Mrs. Norton had set out some minced cooked chicken in the refrigerator, and Mr. Norton set about trying to figure out what to do with it. "Hmmm... we're running low on mayonnaise, or else I'd suggest sandwiches," he said as he fossicked about in the fridge. "How about a stir-fry? We've got some soy sauce, and I can pull a couple carrots and onions and a cabbage from the garden."

"Do you go to church on Sundays?"

Mr. Norton stopped his fossicking. "No, son, I can't say that I do." He pulled his head away from the refrigerator to look at Severus, an amused look on his face. "What brings this on?"

"The burnings."

"The burnings – oh." Mr. Norton suddenly looked as serious as Severus had ever seen him. "The whole reason your people had to go underground."

"Yes."

"Well, don't worry, son. I haven't set foot in a church since I was a little bit older that what you are now. I won't be dragging you to church any time soon."

Severus made an audible sigh. "Thank Merlin for that."

Mr. Norton chuckled. "I was raised Catholic, but Sarah was Baptist, and the two churches frown on 'mixed marriages'. So we decided that if they were going to make a Federal case out of it, we'd just skip the whole church business and just get married by a judge. And that's what we did." He closed the refrigerator door behind him and leaned against it. "Once we started to question that whole business, we started questioning a number of other things. We could have joined the Episcopalians – they're the American version of your Anglicans – but there didn't seem to be much of a point to it by then." He grinned at Severus. "But you didn't answer my question."

"Erm... what question, sir?"

"I wanted to know if you'd like a stir-fry."

"What is it?"

"Asian way of cooking – learned about it when I was stationed overseas. Come out to the garden and help me pick out some vegetables, and then I'll show you."

They went back outside, through the steaming grass, back towards the truck patch. Severus happened to be looking in the direction of the neighbor lady's house.

A movement caught his eye. Someone in that house had opened a window and had stuck a head out of it. He felt the wild urge to reach for his wand, but suppressed it.

"Hello, Mr. Norton!" It was a young girl, about Severus' own age. She waved to Mr. Norton, but her eyes were on the young boy in the heavy black woolen clothes.

Mr. Norton stopped and smiled. "Hello, Julie! What brings you here?"

The girl pushed a lock of long dark hair behind an ear as she turned towards Mr. Norton. "Gran's gout's acting up," she said, a slight frown causing her pert nose to crinkle. "I'm looking after her until she gets better." She then looked meaningfully at Severus.

Mr. Norton took the hint. "Julie Halvorson, this is Severus Snape. Severus is staying with us for a little while."

"Hello," Julie said.

Severus couldn't tell exactly what color her eyes were, at the distance he was from her. But they looked to be dark and vivid and pretty, framed by long eyelashes. And they were looking him up and down. He felt his face getting warm, and knew he must be blushing.

"Hullo," Severus said in reply. Her eyebrows perked up.

"You're not a local person, um, Seferus?"

"_Severus_. Erm, no, I'm from England." That much, at least, was safe to say.

"Wow." Julie looked at him steadily, and their eyes locked. "Wow."

During the previous term, Severus had started on his own to study Legilimency, the art of peering into people's minds. He saw how the Muggle girl was staring at him, and he wondered if it was in disgust or for some other reason. He suspected it was disgust. Pretty girls like her never had much to do with boys like him. Yet part of him couldn't resist holding her gaze as he tried to probe her mind...

_Merlin's bloody beard. _

_She... she likes me! She actually LIKES me!_

_She just thinks I could do with a good... scrubbing..._

"We'll come on over and see you and your grandma later, Julie," Mr. Norton interposed. "Right now we have to get our lunch."

Julie shook herself, as if she had been asleep or in a trance. "Oh... okay, Mr. Norton. See ya later."

"See ya later, Julie." Severus had to will himself not to look at her as he walked away with Mr. Norton towards the truck patch.

"Mr. Norton?" he said, once he was sure they were out of earshot of the Halvorson house.

"Yes?"

"Erm... is it all right if I take a quick bath before we go next door?"

Mr. Norton tried and failed to keep the smile from his face. "Sure, son. You can even take a shower if you prefer."

"A... shower?"

"Yeah. It'll get you cleaner and in less time, because you can wash your hair while you soak the rest of you. I'll show you how it works. And I can rustle up a fresh change of clothes for you, too, and put your dirty clothes in the washing machine."

"Thank you, sir."

------------------

The "stir-fry" turned out to be a variant on the vegetable-heavy Asian take-out meals Severus' father used to bring home, back in the early days before the fighting got to be too bad. The carrots they pulled weren't very big, but they didn't need to be, and it was time for the rows to be thinned a bit anyway. They found a good head of cabbage and an onion ready for the plucking, and then they were back in the house in ten minutes flat.

Mr. Norton set some water to boiling for rice while Severus washed the vegetables in the sink; then he hauled out a big cast-iron skillet. He got the skillet heated up, then added a dash of olive oil. When that was done, the water for the rice was ready, so he put the rice in, put a lid on, and turned the electric heat off.

"So – the coils are heated by electricity?" Severus asked, watching as the red-hot coils under the rice pot started to darken as they cooled.

"Yupper. We live too far out from town for gas hookup, and we like electric heat better anyway. Besides, we can power everything from a backup generator in case the power goes out."

"Ah."

Severus helped with the vegetable chopping; he realized instinctively that the carrots would a) have to be chopped into thin slices, and b) need to go into the skillet even before the chicken meat, which in any event was already cooked and chopped. The onion could done a little more coarsely, and the cabbage he merely shredded, as that would be going in last of all.

Severus was waiting, as he had yesterday, for Mr. Norton to ask him some embarrassing questions. But Mr. Norton, aside from some simple cooking instructions and some vague reminiscences about the food in Korea, didn't say anything.

The stir-fry was pretty tasty, though Severus thought the soy sauce made things a bit too salty. He ate his portion in a hurry, biding the time waiting for Mr. Norton to finish by starting on the washing-up. Mr. Norton chuckled as he ate.

Once Mr. Norton was done and the washed dishes were drying on the rack, Severus fairly flew up the stairs to the bathroom, Mr. Norton following.

"See that doohickey on the wall, son?" Mr. Norton said, pointing to a metal fixture set high in one of the tiled walls surrounding the bathtub. "That's called a shower head..."

---------------------------

Having explained the workings of a shower to Severus, Mr. Norton then mercifully left the bathroom, but not before setting out a bathrobe by the side of the tub.

Severus made it through the showering without incident – well, aside from getting a little shampoo in his eyes, but the water that fell in torrents from the shower took care of that. And Mr. Norton was right: it certainly was quicker and more efficient than a tub bath, if you were in a hurry. Once he was done, he threw a quick Drying Spell on himself, slipped into the bathrobe, and made his way to his bedroom.

While Severus was safely behind the shower curtain, Mr. Norton had gone back into the bathroom to retrieve the boy's robe and other clothing, presumably to be placed in the washing machine. In exchange, he had laid out a pair of nearly-new jeans and a rather smart-looking powder-blue long-sleeved cotton shirt on the bed in Severus' room, along with a fresh set of socks and smalls.

It was a stroke of luck that Severus and Mr. Norton happened to be much of a size; aside from his having to roll up the cuffs on the jeans, everything fit as if Madam Malkin had made it to order. There was one small problem: He wasn't sure he could stow his wand in the sleeves of the shirt. He agonized over this for a good five minutes before deciding that he really didn't need his wand to hand if he was just going to pay a brief call on a Muggle girl and her grandmother.

Before going downstairs, he paused to look at his reflection in the mirror attached to the dressing table in his room. What he saw surprised him.

_I... I look good._

And he did.

The Muggle shampoo that stung his eyes had also stripped out every trace of grease and dirt in his hair. Where before it had been lank and dull, it now was full and lustrous, framing his high-cheekboned face nicely as it fell in a soft fall to his shoulders, its rich blackness complementing the intense, serious blackness of his eyes. The nose was what it was and would always be, but it looked a little less prominent and objectionable now that the hair was clean.

Severus did something he hadn't done since he was a toddler. He grinned at his own reflection in a mirror.

He took the stairs two at a time in his haste to get to the house next door.

--------------------------------

Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley sat together on the couch in the Gryffindor common room, staring at nothing in particular.

It had taken about one and a half cups of tea each, plus a quick Silencing Spell cast around the area, for Harry to explain to Ginny what had happened, and what Harry suggested be done to remedy it.

"Oh, Harry," she said, "but what if it doesn't work?"

"We have to try it, Gin," Harry replied. "Poppy herself said that the longer someone's in a state of this sort, the less likely it is that they'll ever come out of it."

Ginny was silent for a long time after that.

"I just hope it works, Harry," she said finally.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten**

The Halvorson house looked much like the Norton one, except it was smaller and painted white whereas the Norton house wore a greenish-gray paint. Mr. Norton came with Severus up the front path and rang the door-bell.

The door opened, and Severus found himself face to face with Julie Halvorson, dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved cotton blouse, so close he could have touched her. Her eyes, he discovered, were blue, but of a blue so dark it almost seemed black in the relatively dim light inside the house, and in the still-overcast cloudy light outside of it. There was a mole near her mouth; its darkness seemed to emphasize the creamy-pale softness of the rest of her skin. Her hair was of a chestnut brown, dark with soft reddish highlights where the light caught it, and came down past her shoulders.

"Come in," she said, opening the door wide onto a large parlor room, filled with heavy oaken furniture and overstuffed chairs and couches. A large glassed-in case held several plates on display, many of them with a red-and-blue flag design.

There was a hum in the air; Severus traced it to a large metal-and-plastic box that sat in one of the windows and shot cool air about the room. An elderly woman in a cotton house dress sat in one of the chairs, a bandage-swathed foot propped up on a foot stool. She peered at Severus over black-framed reading glasses; her iron-grey hair was short and curled closely to her head.

"Would you like some lemonade?" Julie said, glancing from Severus to Mr. Norton.

"Yes, please," said Severus.

"That'd be great, Julie," said Mr. Norton.

"I'll be right back with it," she said. She flashed a brief smile at them, and Severus had the distinct feeling that her gaze lingered on him for a bit longer than it had on Mr. Norton. What's more, he had, without even trying to use Legilimency, the brief whiff of a thought from her as she looked at him: _He's so handsome... just as I knew he would be, once he cleaned up... _

He tried to keep his heart from leaping at the notion, but failed.

"But first – Gran, this is Severus Snape. He's staying with the Nortons. Severus, this is my grandmother, Hjordis Halvorson."

It was difficult to tell with her sitting down, but Severus guessed that Mrs. Halvorson was a short woman. A short woman, but by no means a small one. Her stout arms bespoke years of hard work and good feeding, and were emblematic of the rest of her. Her face was squared off, the high cheekbones matched by a long wide jaw. She looked rather like an iron brick with legs, to Severus' eyes, strong and self-reliant.

But the legs of the brick had failed her at last, it seemed. One of the legs, anyway. It was swollen with the gout, obviously painful now even as she sat in her chair trying not to move. Severus looked around at the trim sitting room, so clean and well-kept, and wondered at how it must hurt her pride not to be able to get about as she had done until recently. He walked over to her and held out his hand to be shook.

"Severus Snape," she said in a gruff voice, repeating his name back to him. Her grip would have done credit to Brutus Scrimgeour. "Pleased to meet you."

"My pleasure, Ma'am."

Dark blue eyes, the same as her granddaughter's, sparkled from behind her glasses. "Where are you from, Severus?"

"Nottinghamshire. In England, Ma'am."

"Robin Hood country?"

"Yes, Ma'am, though actually Robin Hood was much more active in Yorkshire, just to the north."

"Oh, I see."

"Would you like some more lemonade, Gran?" Julie said, reaching for an empty glass that sat on the small table next to Mrs. Halvorson's chair.

"Yes, I would, dear, thank you," Hjordis Halvorson said, smiling up at her granddaughter. Julie took the empty glass and flitted out of the room towards the kitchen, as light and quick as her grandmother was solid and substantial.

"She's such a good girl," Mrs. Halvorson said once she thought Julie was out of earshot. "I hate for her to be bothered up with an old woman when she should be out enjoying her summer. But I don't want to go into the nursing home... Severus?"

"Yes, Ma'am?"

"That's your name, right, Severus?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Don't mind me, dear, I'm just repeating it so I remember it. If I say something out loud three times, I can usually remember it... Severus..." She suddenly brightened. "But enough about me. Sit down and tell me about yourself, Severus."

The young wizard took a spot on the couch that was nearest Mrs. Halvoroson. "Well, there's not much to tell," he said. _Because I don't dare tell you most of it._ "I'm from Nottingham, in Nottinghamshire, in England. I turned fourteen last January. The rest of it's pretty boring."

"Fourteen? Why, Julie just turned fourteen back in April, didn't you, Julie?" she said, turning to look towards her granddaughter as she returned from the kitchen carrying a tray of glasses.

"Yes, Gran," Julie replied, a small smile on her face as she set the first glass of lemonade down by Mrs. Halvorson. She then gave Mr. Norton his glass, and Severus his. She then set the tray down on a table and carried her own drink over to the couch where Severus was sitting.

Julie looked at Severus with her dark blue eyes, so large and so open to him. "Do you mind if I sit here?" she asked.

Severus felt another blush rising on his cheeks. "No, not at all," he said, his eyes meeting hers. "Please, sit here..." he said, patting a spot on the couch. _And never, ever leave._

She gave him a smile, soft and warm, and sat on the couch on the very spot he had touched with his hand. Her body was less than a foot from his; he thought his heart might explode from the joy that this fact produced in him. But the joy was dashed when he remembered that he was only a visitor here; in a week's time, maybe less, he would be back with his aunt, and he would never see Julie again...

"Hjordis is kind enough to let my cows graze on her property," Mr. Norton said after taking a large gulp of lemonade. "In exchange, we help her out around the house."

"It's nice to know I'm still running a farm, even if it's just a hay farm now," Mrs. Halvorson rejoined. "Been a farm girl all my life, I don't know anything else."

Mr. Norton chuckled. "Oh, I don't know about that, Hjordis. You were a fine nurse during Dubyah-Dubyah-Two, or so the boys at the Sons of Norway tell me."

"The _Sons of Norway!_" shrieked Mrs. Halvorson in mock indignation, a high-pitched cackle unlike her usual speaking voice. "Have those old women who call themselves men been talking about me again!"

And then the conversation took a turn that was largely closed off to Severus and Julie, consisting as it did of old people's reminiscences about long-ago wars and long-ago friends.

It occurred to Severus that he could use the opportunity to start a private conversation with Julie. But did he dare? Did he, when the Ministry officials were probably even now getting ready to Apparate onto the Nortons' property? How could he start something he had no hope of finishing?

He was still debating the question in his head when he felt her hand touch his.

Her hand. Soft, warm, smooth, tender. He found himself gripping it in his own as he looked her in the face.

She returned his look, her gaze full of a question he couldn't quite decipher. So he resorted to Legilimency...

_Oh, Severus, I hope I didn't offend you..._

He raised his eyebrows, and before he could stop himself, he thought back:

_No, Julie, you didn't._

Now it was her turn to raise her eyebrows. _You... you can read minds?_

_A little. But never this well, not until now... with you..._

Julie's mouth opened in a silent O. Severus couldn't help but think of how much he'd like to kiss that mouth – and then realized, to his horror, that Julie had felt him thinking that thought.

_Oh, Julie, I'm sorry – _

She silently puckered up her lips into a kiss, and smiled.

"...and speaking of the cows, Hjordis," said Mr. Norton, "It's time for me to go milk them again. You stay here, Severus," he said, turning towards the boy, a slight grin on his face, "and keep these ladies company."

"Are you sure you won't need me, sir?"

Mr. Norton's grin grew a little wider. "I'm sure, son. Just be back home in time for supper, all right?"

"All right." _Thank you, sir. _

Ministry or no, Severus decided that he would spend as much time with Julie as he could before they took him away. And maybe, once he was of age in another two and a half years, he could come back to see her again, if she would wait that long.

Mr. Norton winked at him as he walked out the door, which caused Severus to wonder if the man could read Severus' mind, too.

-------------------------------------------------

A tall, elderly gentleman, dressed in a rather smart if somewhat unfashionable velvet puce suit, made his way towards the phone booth in front of the Jewel in the Crown Indian take-out place in the High street of Dunfermline. His vigorous stride belied the whiteness of his hair and beard, which were both cut to just above shoulder length. (They had both been somewhat longer fifteen minutes before, and would revert back to their original lengths once he was done with his task and safely at home.)

He had a piece of paper in his hand. The piece of paper contained instructions for dialing an overseas phone number, as well as how to pay for the call. (Hermione Granger's assistance had been invaluable in this regard, as it had been several decades since he had last had occasion to use a telephone.)

He entered the booth, picked up the phone, and sighed. Then, referring to the piece of paper, he carefully dialed the phone number.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter Eleven**

As much as he would have liked to have spent the afternoon gazing into Julie's eyes – which he would have liked even if they couldn't wordlessly talk with one another that way – Severus realized that he had to pay at least some attention to her grandmother. But what did he have to say to this woman? What _could_ he safely say to her?

"Erm, well, so – you've lived here all your life, Mrs. Halvorson?" he asked, temporarily relinquishing Julie's gaze. (But not the touch of her hand, which still rested lightly in the grasp of his own.)

"I sure have, dear," she said in a friendly rumble of a voice. Severus guessed that she had done a lot of shouting, probably of orders to other persons, in her time. "Well, aside from the time I went to war – I'd gone to school to be trained as a nurse's aide, and I'd just finished up with that when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. That was what allowed Roosevelt to get us to go to war – there was a large isolationist movement, mostly paid for by the Germans, to keep us from helping your people out during the Blitz and afterward."

"Yes, the Blitz." Severus knew about that from BBC history programmes on the Muggle wireless. (He also knew, from Professor Binns' History of Magic classes, about the role played in the Blitz by the Dark wizard Grindewald, who was helping the Nazis attack Britain – and the role played by Albus Dumbledore, who thwarted Grindewald's efforts before defeating him for good in 1945.)

"But Pearl Harbor changed all that." She stretched a little in her chair. "That got America into the war against both Japan and Germany. By the time the war was over, I was the head of the nursing staff."

Severus nodded. He could easily see her as the Matron of some wartime hospital. Hardworking, dependable, tough.

"But then the war ended, and they didn't need so many of us around anymore. Plus I wanted to get back home. So I came home, and I stayed there."

She was silent for some time after that. Her eyes were looking, not at Severus or Julie, but apparently at nothing in particular. Severus could sense something boiling up inside her, but couldn't determine what it was.

Suddenly, she moved her gout-ridden leg from the stool to the floor, wincing as she did so. She put out her hand over to the side of the chair, grabbing onto a metal-tube contraption of some sort, and dragged the metal thing until it was in front of her.

"I have to go down the hall for a moment, Severus," she said, hoisting herself upright with her hands braced on the metal device. Her voice was a touch more strained than it had been. "Julie, why don't you take Severus outside and show him around? I'll be back in a minute."

Julie was off the couch in a flash, hovering by her grandmother. "Are you sure you don't need help, Gran?"

Mrs. Halvorson made something that she'd apparently intended to be a smile, but which came out looking more like a grimace. "I'll be fine, dear."

Julie stood back, but only enough to allow her grandmother to move past her with the walking device. Mrs. Halvorson braced herself with her arms in a white-knuckle grip on the front of the device, but once she got moving she progressed smoothly enough. Julie ran ahead of her down the hall, to a room that Severus guessed must be the bathroom, and opened the door for her; Hjordis nodded to her as she hobbled inside. Julie closed but did not completely shut the door behind her.

"It drives her nuts when I do that, but it takes her five minutes to get the door open by herself when she's using the walker," Julie explained in a low voice once she was back in the parlor. She made a small smile, but Severus saw the beginnings of tears welling in her eyes.

_Do you want to stay here and watch her?_ he asked with his mind.

_I do. But she wants to be alone right now. Probably so she can do what I'm doing, without anyone seeing her doing it._ And even as Julie thought those words, large tears rolled down her cheeks.

_It's not just her leg, it's her head_, Julie's mind wailed, even as her voice was silent. _She was always so smart, it's what she was known for... and now she's losing that, too... and she knows it..._

Severus took a quietly shaking Julie by the hand and led her outside, just as they both heard soft sobs coming from the bathroom.

-------------------------------

The sun was now fully out, the clouds had been banished. Brilliant sunshine seemed to have lit everything from within with a golden glow. It was a stark contrast to the mood inside the house, and which clung to them like pollen to a bee.

Julie walked along in a daze, tense and shuddering with the effort of restraining her tears. But Severus pulled her to him, placing her head on his shoulder, and suddenly the tension that had been holding her up just oozed out of her as she collapsed onto him, crying and sobbing while he stroked her back.

After a while she pulled her face away from his shoulder so she could look up into his eyes_. I'm sorry about that, Severus. Here I am, embarrassing myself in front of someone I've just met._

Severus gave her a faint smile as he stroked her cheek._ I feel as if I've known you all my life, Julie. It's a bit scary._

Julie smiled back at him. _It is, isn't it? _She reached a hand up to his own cheek, copying his movements. _And yet, it feels good. It feels right._

_Yes, it does._ Severus looked away for a moment, taking in with a sweeping glance the area where they stood, then turned back to her. _So... we were told that you must show me the farm..._

Julie giggled. _Oh, yeah, right. _

_Then let's see the farm._

Julie smirked at him. "Well, there's not much to see," she said out loud, waving a hand around her. "We've got grass, and hay, and a barn, and the house, and that's about it."

Severus looked around at the hay-field, gleaming like green-tinted gold in the sun, waving and rippling in the wind just like a rolling sea. He saw the lush green grass that the cows, Ava and Marilyn, kept short by their grazing. He saw a trim white barn in back of the farmhouse. He saw in the distance the tall, graceful trees, deciduous trees of some sort, that bordered the edges of the property and dropped down to follow the contours of the ridge that sloped down in back of both the Halvorson and Norton farms.

"Not really," he said. "It's all very exotic and beautiful to my eyes."

Julie looked at him in surprise. "It is?"

"It is." _And so are you._

Julie put a hand to her mouth as Severus realized he'd done it again.

"I'm sorry, Julie," he said aloud, looking away and pulling away from her.

"Severus, it's okay."

He turned his face back towards her again, disbelieving what he'd just heard, yet hopeful all the same.

"This – this is all so new to me," she said, putting a hand on his arm. "Not just the mind thing, but – the whole falling in love thing, if this is what this is." She brought her eyes to meet his dead on. "Do you think there's such a thing as 'love at first sight'?"

There was no way he could lie to her, ever if he'd wanted to. "I didn't think so, until now." His face grew solemn. "But I'm afraid we might not have a future."

"Because we live so far apart?"

"That's one reason." He took a deep breath. "But there's another..." He looked around the area and saw the Halvorson barn. "I can't show you or tell out here. Let's go into the barn."

"The barn? Why?"

"So you won't be lying when you told your grandmother you'd showed me everything."

Julie crinkled her nose at him. "Smarty pants."

Severus smiled at her. "Bossy boots."

"All right, then, let's see the barn."

---------------------------------------------------

The barn turned out to be just a storage place for hay. Hay, hay, and loads more hay, with some soybeans stored off to the side. It was hot, and close, even with a set of double doors on the upper storey hayloft open for ventilation. But despite the heat, Julie made good on showing Severus the barn, even climbing with him up into the hayloft so he could see that.

"All right, now," she said, wiping the sweat from her forehead. She'd spent the last five minutes explaining the various machinery used to move and store hay bales, and it was thirsty work up in that loft. "What is it that's so secret that we have to be in here for it?"

"This," Severus replied.

He pointed a finger at a hay bale next to Julie, closed his eyes, and thought hard. It would be difficult without a wand, but he thought he could manage it...

"_Frigidio!_"

A blue, wavering cone of power shot from Severus' finger, and a layer of frost settled around the hay bale. The cold wafted from the bale in all directions, and suddenly the hayloft was no longer so oppressively hot.

Severus lowered his arm. Now for the _really _difficult part.

He looked at Julie. Julie looked at him, then at the hay bale, then at him. She reached out a hand to touch the bale, then drew it back as if she'd burned herself.

"You did this," she breathed.

"Yes."

She looked him in the eye. Is this the same thing... that lets you read my mind?

_A little. But you can read mine, so it's not totally the same thing._

_What IS it?_

Severus wanted to wait before telling her, but he wasn't yet skilled enough to keep his thoughts behind a wall. _Magic._

_Magic? You mean like witchcraft?_

Severus snorted._ Depends on the witch. But actually, I'm a wizard; only women are witches._

Julie's mouth hung open, but no sound came out. He feared the worst.

_Julie, please don't hate me!_

She looked at him perplexedly. _Why should I hate you, Severus?_

He bit into his lower lip to try and maintain some control over himself. _Because... our kind gets hunted down by your kind. Have been for centuries._

Julie put a hand out to him. _Well, not by me, they don't._

Severus couldn't have hid his relief from her even if he'd wanted to. _Thank you, Julie._

She took her other hand and put it on top of his. _Please don't be afraid of me, Severus._

She smiled at him._ I promise not to eat you. Or hurt you in any other way..._She grinned_. ...but only if you show me another magic trick._

The young wizard gave her a small smile._ Oh, all right. It's tricky without my wand, but I'll try something..._

Severus looked at an old scythe that was hanging on the wall nearest them; from the rust stains adorning the wooden pegs holdingit in place, he guessed it probably hadn't been touched in decades, not since Hjordis Halvorson was herself a young girl like Julie.

"_Wingardium Leviosa!" _he shouted pointing a finger at the scythe.It rose slowly and wobbly, into the air.

"Wow," Julie whispered. "You really can –"

But that was as far as she got. The scythe trembled in mid-air, and started to fall towards her.

Severus jumped in the path of the blade, pushing it out of the way with his arm. The scythe fell with a thump onto the wooden floor of the hayloft.

"Whew! That was close!" Julie said. She bent down to pick up the scythe – and saw a small smear of blood on the rust-pocked blade.

"Severus! You're hurt!" Julie cried, just as Severus noticed the gash on his shirt sleeve and the red stain spreading from it. "Oh my God – let me go get Gran – "

"No," Severus said forcefully, though pain-gritted teeth. "I can handle this. Just – help me with my shirt, all right?"

"All right," Julie replied, undoing the buttons on his shirt, "but if whatever you're doing doesn't work --"

"It'll work, believe me."

The shirt was soon off, and they both could get a better look at the wound. A light gash, luckily, only about an inch and a half long, but it was bleeding.

Severus put his hand over the wound and murmured something Julie didn't quite catch, over and over again, for a few minutes. Julie looked at him with increasing worry, but she didn't dare interrupt.

At last, he stopped his chanting and lifted his hand from the wound. The gash was gone, as if it hadn't happened. Only the dried blood around it hinted that anything could have been amiss.

"Ohmygod," Julie said, her hand to her mouth. "You did it. You healed yourself."

"That's nothing," Severus said gamely. "If I'd had my wand, I could have done this in ten seconds. Then again, if I'd had my wand, I wouldn't have dropped the scythe at all."

Julie stared at the spot on his arm where the wound had been. "Oh, Severus... I was so scared for you..."

And then she wrapped her arms around him and put her mouth to his.

It was a light kiss, shy and tentative; their noses almost touched more than their lips. But it sent Severus' blood singing.

_Oh Julie, if you keep doing that I'd gladly take a thousand cuts from a scythe..._

"You would?" she said out loud, giggling as she did so.

"Well, maybe not a thousand... but two or three more, probably --"

Her lips found his again, and this time they lingered.

It was quite some time before he could be bothered to use the Repairing and Cleaning spells on his shirt.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter Twelve**

The rest of that afternoon, Severus felt as if his feet were barely touching the ground. (Well, they weren't – they were touching the wooden beams of the hayloft floor. But that was beside the point.)

At home and at school, he'd watched with envy as boys like Sirius Black had girls draped over them like jewelry. He'd wondered if he himself would ever have even one girl to call his own. Now, he'd not only found a girl, but a soulmate. _I'll wager that none of Black's girlfriends can talk to him with their minds_, he thought to himself, and the realization made him even happier.

Once his borrowed shirt was clean and whole and on his back again, Julie and Severus had sat in the barn, curled up near the frozen hay bale (it kept back the heat of the day rather nicely, it did) and talked about many things. They had a lot to talk about, but they also wanted to be sure that they didn't walk in on Julie's grandmother while she was still crying.

Severus told Julie about the wizarding world and why it hid from the Muggle world, and he told her about Hogwarts and some of the things he'd learned there, and even, with only a little hesitation, about his mother and father and what had happened to them. That last story seemed to get easier to tell each time he told it. Maybe it was the fact of the repitition; maybe it was the people to whom he was telling it.

In return, Julie told him about the United States in general and Minnesota in particular, and what it was like to grow up as a Muggle girl in a large Norwegian-American family, and that she lived in a big city called Minneapolis but was staying with her grandmother for the summer, and that the flag on the plates on display in her gran's parlor was the Norwegian flag, and that she wanted to be an actress – "but a stage one, not a movie one" – when she grew up.

And all the while, they sat next to each other, bodies touching, communicating in a way that neither tongue nor brain could accomplish.

They might have sat up in the hayloft the rest of the day, were it not for the sudden arrival of a squinty small girl with a loud voice:

"So are you two gonna sit up there and be disgusting all day?"

Severus looked down at the floor of the barn. Becky was staring up at him, scowling.

He laughed, and started to climb down the hayloft ladder.

----------------------

The proprietors of the Café di Napoli had done well by the Nortons. When Severus entered the kitchen, he saw Mrs. Norton carrying a huge tray of some meat dish that smelled delicious. She set it on the kitchen counter as she greeted Severus and Becky with a smile.

"They gave us so much food today, I can't get all of it on the table," she said, nodding her head at the display of steaming trays that covered nearly every inch of space on the counter. "I put the tiramisu in the fridge because there's no room for it out here. We'll just have to dish everything up from the counter."

The meat dish turned out to be veal scallopini, breaded veal cutlets with stuffed mushrooms and Marsala wine sauce. The other trays were filled with red and yellow peppers, spinach in garlic and olive oil, artichoke hearts, toasted garlic bread with olive oil for dipping, and a salad mix of baby greens, beefsteak tomatoes, onion, garlic and basil, drizzled again with the ever-present olive oil.

There was so much of it that Severus, staring at the vast amounts laid out before him, had a sudden thought.

"Mrs. Norton?"

"Yes, Severus?"

"Would it be all right if we invited Mrs. Halvorson and her granddaughter to share this supper?"

Mrs. Norton's bright blue eyes twinkled. "That'd be a wonderful idea, Severus. There's way too much here for just us anyway. Hjordis might not be able to come, but we can bring some of it to her. You wait here while I make up a tray, then you can bring it to her and Julie."

And he did.

------------------------------------------------

Severus sat upstairs in his room, reading by the light of his wand. He'd just finished the first part of his Dark Arts essay, to be handed in to whoever was teaching the class next year. Strange, the way Hogwarts ran through Dark Arts teachers. Perhaps it was the subject matter.

A Muggle newspaper, the Minneapolis Star, was at his elbow on the table; he had been reading it in fits and starts, trying to understand the world into which he had suddenly been thrust. He was amazed at how chaotic things seemed to be among the Muggles. The American president, on the verge of being removed from office for acts of corruption, escaping his own country to make a tour of Russia. The death of Juan Peron, the Argentine dictator, and the immediate succession to power of his widow. More violence in Northern Ireland. The murder of a woman who was the mother of a prominent leader in the American Civil Rights movement, himself murdered a few years earlier by Muggles who apparently were the Muggle versions of 'pure-bloods'.

He leaned back in his chair and sighed. The Muggles seemed to have a talent for mucking things up.

And yet, here in this farmhouse, the muck-up all seemed so far away. All he saw were rolling green fields and tall trees, and good people (aside from Becky)... and a soulmate.

It had been such a glorious day. Even the fact that his old underwear had finally disintegrated in the washing machine couldn't detract from it. Mrs. Norton promised to go into town to get him some new smalls and some extra socks, in case his stay here was prolonged.

Prolonged. There was the rub.

On the one hand, he wanted to get back to the wizarding world. On the other hand, he didn't want to get back to most of the people in it.

Severus sighed again, and got ready for bed.

----------------------------------------

Mr. Norton didn't need any help with the cows the next morning, thanks to Severus' fixing the milking machine, so Severus instead offered to pick berries and see to the truck patch. This offer was gladly accepted, and after a good breakfast (it was Severus' first encounter with hashed brown potatoes, and like most everything else here so far, he found that he liked them very much), he set out with Mrs. Norton and Becky to the barn to fetch the berry baskets.

Julie was standing by the barn door, wearing jeans, a short-sleeved shirt, and a kerchief round her head to hold back her hair. She smiled when she saw the Nortons, and she smiled even more when she saw Severus.

_Good morning_, she said to him mentally, a greeting meant for him alone.

_Good morning_, he replied, as his heart rose in his chest.

"Good morning, everybody," Julie then said out loud, taking her eyes off Severus for the moment. "May I help with the berrying?"

"Good morning, Julie," replied Mr. Norton, his ever-present grin on his face. "Sure! Come along!"

"Gran and I really appreciated the dinner last night," Julie said as they entered the barn. "So we thought the least we could do would be to have me help out a bit now that the berries are in high gear."

"That's really sweet of you both, Julie," Mrs. Norton beamed. "Here, here's a set of baskets; you and Severus can do the raspberries."

"That would be great, Mrs. Norton," Julie said as she took the baskets Mrs. Norton handed her.

Severus was right behind Julie, waiting for his own set of berry baskets; when Mrs. Norton handed them to him, he thought he saw her smile grow even wider as she looked him in the eye.

"You run along now and have fun," she said warmly.

_Great Merlin's Bones_, he thought as he followed Julie out to the berry patch_. Is it that obvious?_

_Yes_, Julie mentally giggled in front of him.

This nearly made Severus drop his baskets. _Oh bloody hell, we can communicate without needing to look at each other!_

_Is that a bad thing? _Julie asked as she walked.

_No – it's just that it's not supposed to be possible..._

Julie snorted. _In my world, _you're _not supposed to be possible. If I can handle it, you can handle it._

_If you insist my lady..._

Julie giggled some more.

----------------------------

There were two figures standing on the grounds just outside of Hogwarts. They were soon joined by a third.

"Ah, Molly! So good of you to come on such short notice."

"Good evening, Professor Dumbledore, Professor McGonagall."

"Good evening, Molly."

"You remember the coordinates, Molly?"

"Like the back of my hand, Professor."

"Then let's be off."

There was the sight of three near-simultaneous flashes of light, and the sound of three near-simultaneous loud bangs, and then the grounds were empty.


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter Thirteen**

Julie and Severus spent the morning much as they had spent the previous afternoon: within inches of one another. This suited them both just fine. She turned out to be as nearly as dexterous with berries as Severus and kept pace with him pretty well, even though their minds weren't totally on picking berries.

The issue of privacy had reared its head; both Severus and Julie wanted to to be able to have private head space of their own. So Severus explained to her about the mental technique of 'thinking behind a wall', as it didn't require magic to use. They practiced it as their hands kept busy working the berries, and it didn't take long before they both had the equivalent of, if not yet walls, at least screens behind which they could retreat at need.

Before they knew it, it was mid-morning; Julie trooped off with Severus and the Nortons to the barn to get the berries stored away. It was then that Severus realized he'd forgotten something.

"Erm, Mr. Norton?" he said, as they entered the barn.

"Yes?"

"I've – I've told Julie about me. About who I am."

"Ah." A pause. "And she doesn't mind?"

"No."

"Did you tell her grandma?"

"No." _Truth be told, we weren't sure she'd remember it, anyway..._

Another pause. "So we can go ahead and use the newfangled freezing technique in front of her?"

"Erm, yes, sir, exactly."

"Then let's get crackin'. Julie, come over here, you're going to love this..."

---------------------------------------------

The time flew by in the field, and it was soon lunchtime.

There was still plenty of food left over from last night, so it was no trouble at all for Mrs. Norton to heat it up and serve it. Julie was invited to stay for lunch, but she declined, saying that she'd better check in on her grandmother.

Standing outside the kitchen door, Severus watched Julie as she walked back to her grandmother's house, right until the moment she disappeared inside of it. Mr. Norton didn't fail to notice this.

"She's a really sweet girl, son."

There was a short silence before Severus finally replied. "Yes, she is."

"I'm glad to see her making friends her own age. She's a pretty smart girl, but she's shy – doesn't like to hang around with other boys and girls, prefers to read books and things. And here she's been by herself with only her grandma for company."

"Yes." Severus turned towards Mr. Norton. "How long has her grandmother been ill?"

Mr. Norton leaned against the side of the house and stared off at nothing in particular, then let out a sigh. "With the gout, about a year. With the memory trouble, a little bit longer. Her kids have been trying to take care of her, taking turns coming down to look after her, but they're all moved to the Cities and they want to put her in a nursing home up there so they don't have to make a three-hour drive to look in on her."

"Ah."

"She doesn't want to leave her farm. But she's going to have to, pretty quick here."

Severus nodded. There wasn't much more for him to say.

He followed Mr. Norton into the house.

-------------------------------------

All through lunch, something was nagging at Severus' brain. But he couldn't quite put his finger on it.

In the midst of biting into his veal, he looked out the kitchen window and saw the herb box. And then he found it.

He recalled thinking of a line from Shakespeare yesterday, when communing with Julie: _Rosemary, that's for remembrance..._

He forced himself to finish his lunch, and even to hang around and help with the dishes, but as soon as he could he ran upstairs to get his copy of _Encyclopedia of Potions_. He flipped it open to the index, scanning the pages feverishly until he found the reference he wanted.

Perfect. Not only did he have all of the ingredients for it in his trunk, he even had a fresh supply of rosemary as well.

Severus tucked the book under his arm and raced back down the stairs, nearly colliding with Mr. Norton on the way down.

"Whoa, son! Take it easy! What's the big hurry?"

"Mr. Norton," he said, holding up the book, "I think I've found something to help Mrs. Halvorson..."

Mr. Norton looked at Severus for a moment. "You have?" he said quietly.

"Yes, sir. Not with the gout, unfortunately. But I think I can help her with her memory..."

---------------------------------------------------------

The top of the Norton's kitchentable was covered with various and sundry things. Fresh sprigs of rosemary were piled in one spot, giving the air an invigorating scentHeaps of chopped ginkgo, periwinkle, and Chinese club moss were also to hand. A cutting board and knife sat next to a book on potions. And in the midst of everything, the contents of a small iron cauldron, heated by a portable magical flame, bubbled away merrily.

"Why not use the stove, son?" Mr. Norton had asked as Severus was setting out his supplies.

"I'm not familiar enough with how quickly it heats things, or how hot," Severus replied as he cast a Cooling Charm on the trivet on which the portable flame would sit; he didn't want to leave scorch marks on the table. "And with potions it's always best not to have to guess at anything. One must be sure, utterly _sure_, of what one is doing..."

When the time was right, Severus poured the contents of the cauldron into a dozen glass canning jars, then sealed them tightly. A cardboard box stood ready to receive the jars.

"There," he said, pleased with himself. "That should be a six-month supply. It's not a cure, but she should be fairly well sorted as long as she drinks it an ounce of it once a day, mixed in with a glass of water."

"You sure it won't harm her, Severus?" said Mrs. Norton, looking somewhat dazedly at the ranks of sealed Ball jars.

"Not at all, Ma'am. All the ingredients are quite safe – you yourself use the rosemary for cooking – and all they'll do is stimulate the blood flow to her brain and enhance general brain function."

Mr. Norton stood and stared at the cauldron, then at the jars. "I _will_ be dipped. Can we take them over to her right now?"

"Certainly, sir."

"Then let's get these jars in the box so we can get 'em over to her."

They soon had the jars packed; Mr. Norton himself picked up the box, grunting a little as he did so. Severus surreptitiously cast a Levitating spell on the box, and suddenly Mr. Norton found the box to be a lot easier to carry.

"Thanks, son," he said, as Mrs. Norton held the door open for them to go outside.

Julie Halvorson was tidying up the sitting room when she looked out the window and saw Severus and the Nortons coming her way. Severus saw Julie and caught her eye.

_Julie... _

_Yes?_

_I... I think I might know of something to help your gran's mind..._

Her eyes went wide, and her face nearly glowed with hope and apprehension. _You do? But... how!_

_I have some training in the use of medicinal herbs..._

To Severus' mind, the look that suddenly appeared on Julie's face really was worth a thousand scythe-cuts.

----------------------------------

Three figures walking along a gravel road in the heat of a September afternoon, one of them talking rather animatedly:

"First I'd spent weeks tracking him down, but I couldn't do anything because of the state of the Muggle government in America at the time – the wizarding authorities were on tenterhooks there watching over that Nixon fellow to make sure he didn't blow up the world out of pique; they didn't have time to look for a lost child. It wasn't until after he was safely out of office, and that Ford fellow installed in his place, that they were able to spare us any attention." The speaker kicked a rock in frustration. "And if I'd known what she was going to do – to _insist_ on, once we'd found him..."

"Quite understandable, Molly," one of her companions, the tall elderly male one, said soothingly. "You were acting in good faith. Lobelia Prince was not."

"She didn't even _want_ him, Professor! That's the part that sticks in my craw. She didn't even want him. She didn't lift a finger to look for him. It was only after we'd found him that she exerted any sort of effort, and_ that_ –" here she slapped her thigh, in angry emphasis "– was to keep us from letting him stay with the Nortons."

"Yes – the mere idea of him being happier as a Muggle seemed to infuriate her, didn't it?" said the third person of the party, a light Scottish burr ornamenting her voice. "Ah, but here we are..."

A house was at the top of the slight rise they were walking along. A figure had stepped out of the front door, and was looking their way.

"Here we are, indeed."


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter Fourteen**

Mrs. Halvorson, being a trained nurse, had looked bit askance at the box of Mason jars. She didn't put too much trust in herbal remedies. But she watched as Severus drank an ounce of the stuff in water in front of her, and when he didn't fall gasping to the floor after fifteen minutes had passed she grudgingly said she'd be willing to give it a try.

Fifteen minutes after that, she was badgering Severus for the recipe, as he had thought she would. He agreed, but only on the condition that he be present to help her make it. (It was one of the few potions that didn't require any sort of magic to prepare, which is why he had picked it.) He wrote it out for her and made a mental note to send her some ginkgo, periwinkle, and Chinese club moss by Muggle post once he got back to the wizarding world. (Assuming, of course, that they didn't already have those particular herbs readily to hand in this part of the Muggle world. He would have to look into that...)

And all the while, all that time, he could feel Julie's mind near his.

She was broadcasting at first a mix of hope and fear; then, as Severus stood before them, hale and unharmed, the hope began to overtake the fear; and then later, when the mist cleared from her grandmother's eyes, the joy she felt could have fueled a Patronus Charm.

The joy, and the gratitude she felt towards Severus, and the affection she already had for him, surrounded him and lifted him up as if he were a feather floating on a river. He felt as if he could float on top of that tide of love and happiness almost until it brought him home.

But did he really want to go home? He was starting to have his doubts about that.

----------------------------------------

There was a light tap-tap-tap on the picture window in the Nortons' parlor. It was so soft a tap that Severus, who was just coming down the front stairs, thought at first he was imagining it.

Then he looked up, and saw the eagle.

It was a bald eagle, quite large and impressive. It also was perched, somewhat precariously on one leg, on top of the small bush underneath the picture window, and it didn't look too happy about it.

"What is an eagle – " Severus started to say, before he realized what it must be. The largish parcel gripped by the talons on the eagle's other leg confirmed his suspicions.

"It's a messenger bird from the American wizarding authorities, it must be," he said, just as Mrs. Norton came out from the kitchen to investigate. He turned to her. "Do you have any crackers, Ma'am?"

"I'll go get some, and some water," said Mrs. Norton, who turned on her heel and went back the way she had come. Severus was impressed that she took Avian Post in stride; he remembered his father's reaction to his first Owl Post...

_No_, Severus told himself, abruptly shutting off that gruesome memory. But it left enough of a residue that he trembled a little as he opened the front door to let the bird inside.

The bird flew into the open door and made for Mrs. Norton's dining room table, upon which it deposited – or rather, heaved – the parcel it had been clutching. The package, a half-cylindrical item about an inch thick and a foot long, skidded across the table top, nearly hitting one of Mrs. Norton's candlesticks. The bird, relieved of its burden, perched atop the back of a dining-room chair. It looked at Severus with a rather discerning eye for a bird, even for an eagle.

"She'll be back with some food and water for you, don't worry," he told the eagle. It blinked, and made a loud sound that was half chirrup, half screech.

Severus picked up the parcel. It was wrapped in some sort of parchment, which was fastened together with a red wax seal. He tried to pull off the seal, but the eagle screeched at him so loudly he dropped the package.

"Cursed bloody bird," Severus muttered, picking up the parcel. "Why won't you let me open it?"

The eagle looked at him, then looked at Mrs. Norton, who was entering the room carrying a tray laden with crackers and a dish of water.

"You – you want her to open it?"

The eagle chirruped and nodded.

Severus turned and, shaking his head, handed the package to Mrs. Norton. She looked at the bird, which nodded its head again, this time more forcefully.

Mrs. Norton carefully pulled off the wax seal, set it on the table, and gingerly unwrapped the parchment. Inside was an ivory tube, with another piece of parchment inside of it.

"This is so strange," Severus said. "Why use a tube? Why not simply use an enchanted envelope, the way our Ministry does?"

"Don't ask me," Mrs. Norton said with a chuckle. "I've never got a letter from a bird before, tube or envelope." She tapped the tube on her palm, and the rolled parchment slid out onto her open hand. She held it up and motioned Severus to her side, so that he could read it as well:

_UNITED STATES OF AMERICA  
__Department of Magic  
__Washington, D.C._

_July 2, 1974_

_Mr. John B. Norton_  
_Mrs. Sarah L. Norton  
__County Route Ten  
__The Exact Middle of Norway Township  
__Fillmore County, Minnesota, USA _

_Dear Mr. & Mrs. Norton:_

_It has come to our attention that though you are a non-magical couple, an underage witch or wizard has been using magic in or near your home. _

_An official from the Department of Magic will make a visit to your home tomorrow at 1:30 p.m. Central Time to review the situation and to take any measures that are authorized or recommended under Federal wizarding law. If the underage witch or wizard will be living with you for an extended period of time, the official will provide information and Federal guidelines as described in Section 14 (d)(1) of the United States Wizarding Code._

_Sincerely Yours,_

_Rolando Hawkinson  
__Assistant Deputy Associate Vice Manager  
__United States Department of Magic _

_RL/js_

Mrs. Norton looked at the letter, then at Severus.

"So they're coming to get you," she said.

"It would seem so."

She bit at her lower lip. "We'll miss you, Severus."

"I'll miss you all, too," he replied, with some difficulty owing to the lump that had appeared in his throat.

"And you'd better write to us."

"I will, Ma'am, I promise. And I'll come back someday."

The eagle made a brief cracker-muffled chirrup from its perch on the dining-room chair.

She looked down at the letter again and re-read it. The sad look on her face turned into a pensive one. "Wait a minute – this is dated for yesterday..."

Severus caught her meaning. "And it refers to a visit to take place today at 1:30."

Mrs. Norton looked at her watch. "It's 1:45 right now. So where's the official?"

There was a bright flash and then a loud crack, sounding midway between a lightning bolt and a car backfiring, on the front lawn outside. The eagle screeched, and so did Mrs. Norton; she jumped straight up into the air, almost landing on one of Severus' feet.

"_What_ was_ that!_"

"Probably the official," said Severus, craning his neck so he could peer out the open front door. "That was somebody Apparating onto your property."

"Apparating?"

"It's a form of magical travel," Severus explained, his eyes still on the front door, and on the figure rapidly approaching it from the outside. Said figure was that of a woman, rail-thin and spiky, with dark-rimmed glasses, a beaked nose, and brown hair tucked into a bun. She was wearing what would have been a rather smart three-piece navy blue suit ensemble, were it not for the straw boater on her head. She carried a briefcase and wore a somewhat harried, businesslike look on her face, striding right up to the threshold before stopping short as if she had suddenly hit a glass wall.

"Mrs. Norton?" she said, squinting through black-rimmed cat-eye spectacles.

Mrs. Norton was at the door in a trice. "Yes?"

"I'm Euphemia Kramarczuk, and I'm a field agent with the United States Department of Magic. May I come in?"

"Oh, certainly. We just got the letter from Mr. Hawkinson."

Agent Kramarczuk's eyes snapped wide open. "Just now?"

"Just now," replied Mrs. Norton, stepping to one side so that the D.O.M. field agent could see the eagle perched on a chair.

"Flipping Paracelsus on a crutch!" exclaimed Agent Kramarczuk. "That letter should have got here yesterday! I'm so sorry about this – we try to give folks a day or two to get ready before we arrive." She entered the house and made straight for the eagle, which gave her a loud caw and shook a gold-banded leg at her.

"Oh, no wonder – Rolando sent it out," she sighed in disgust. "He's been busier than a one-armed paper hanger, what with all the hoo-ha about Nixon. He probably sent it out yesterday afternoon, which of course means there was no way you'd get it until now."

"Nixon hoo-ha? You mean the impeachment?" asked Mrs. Norton.

"Yeah. Tricky Dick's caught between the Republican National Committee, which wants him to resign before he can be impeached and take down half the sitting G.O.P. members of Congress in the elections this fall, and his own damn ego. Al Haig's asked the D.O.M. to keep a close watch on the ding-dong and his staff so they doesn't do something really stupid; meanwhile, we're busy bringing Gerry Ford up to speed on the wizarding world so that we're ready if and when Nixon does leave office." She looked at the bird and petted its head; it chirped softly at her in response. "That's been taking up all our time lately, Rolando's especially. It means that tracking underaged magic-users has sorta fallen by the way side." She looked over at Severus. "Speaking of which..."

Severus stepped forward. "That would be me, Miss. Severus Snape."

Agent Kramarczuk's eyebrows went up; she had obviously noted the English accent. "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Snape. Are you a house guest of the Nortons?"

"Erm, yes."

"Are you an American citizen?"

"No, Miss, I'm not."

"Thought so. Hold on a minute." The D.O.M. agent lifted up her briefcase, and then let it go; it obligingly tilted on its side so that it lay flat as it floated in the air. She gave it a light tap, and it sprung open, revealing a sheaf of papers stuffed rather haphazardly inside.

"You're not going to punish him, are you?" Mrs. Norton said, as the agent rooted through the papers in the floating briefcase. "He was only trying to get home."

Agent Kramarczuk lifted up her head from the pile of papers. Her straw boater tipped precariously backwards on her head. "Get home?"

"I was standing on the platform at King's Cross in London this Sunday afternoon last when I was hit by several hexes," Severus supplied. "I was knocked unconscious, and the next thing I knew I was lying on my back in the middle of a farm field. The Nortons took me in, and I decided that if I used a lot of magic, then someone like you would come and take me home and off of their hands."

The DOM agent's thin-lipped mouth twisted and puckered as she digested this information. "Hmmmm. Getting you home's going to be easier said than done, Mr. Snape."

Severus' mouth fell open in surprise. "Why?"

Agent Kramarczuk held up a hand. "First off, things are in turmoil in the D.O.M. right now, as I've said. Second off, we have to put through a formal request to your Ministry of Magic before we can get you back into their jurisdiction. Third off..." She made a small, grim smile. "... your Ministry heads and our Department heads aren't getting along well right now. They're angry at us for not being of more assistance to them with their Death Eater problem, even though we've got our hands full keeping Nixon from opening up his briefcase with the launch codes. So they're not talking to us. Our eagles to them come back unanswered."

Severus' heart sank. "So I can't go home."

"Not right away, you can't. But the Nixon thing should be taken care of in a few weeks, at which time we'll be free to start smoothing things over with your Ministry. In the meantime," she said, and her smile turned a bit more cheerful and genuine, "if the Nortons don't mind, you can stay here a few more weeks. Heck," she said, pulling out a set of papers from the briefcase, "you might decide to stay here for a bit longer if you want." She handed the papers to Severus, who looked at them with a puzzled expression on his face.

"What are these?"

"Citizenship papers, plus applications to the various American wizarding schools – we have four of them, you know. One of them happens to be in Minneapolis."

"Minneapolis..." That was where Julie lived, when she wasn't staying with her gran.

"You might not want to be going back to the U.K. anytime soon, what with the Death Eaters running around. The D.O.M. has issued travel warnings to American witches and wizards – only essential travel, no vacation trips or anything like that is being allowed right now."

"But things aren't that bad," protested Severus. "I was perfectly safe at Hogwarts."

"Yeah, because Albus Dumbledore's running the joint now, and he doesn't mess around. It's the one place in Britain the Death Eaters don't dare touch, but how long that's gonna last, nobody knows." A sober expression appeared on Agent Kramarczuk's thin face. "Lots of British wizarding families are sending their kids over here to wait it out until they're finally stamped out."

"Have you heard anything from Severus' aunt?" Mrs. Norton asked. "Anything at all?"

"Not a thing, either officially or unofficially," replied Agent Kramarczuk. "I just checked through my copies of the latest Missing Child Reports, just to be sure. The Ministry hasn't forwared any reports to us, and we haven't had any direct inquiries from private citizens in the U.K."

"So Aunt Lobelia's not looking for me," Severus said, in a toneless voice.

The D.O.M. field agent looked at him with a sympathetic expression on her face. "I hate to say it, but she probably isn't. We usually get inquiries, even international inquiries, within a few hours of the child's disappearance."

"I see." It didn't surprise him overmuch, but it still hurt.

"Then he's staying with us," said a twangy, drawly male voice, coming from the kitchen. Mr. Norton had been out in the chicken shed; he had apparently heard the loud crack made by the Apparition and had come to investigate.

Agent Kramarczuk whipped her head around to see the source of the voice. "Are you Mr. Norton?" she asked.

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Norton," she said, setting out a hand for him to shake, which he did. "How much of this have you heard so far?"

"Enough," he replied. He wasn't smiling, for once. "Enough almost to be disgusted with his aunt for not taking him back, if it weren't for the fact that he's better off here." He looked at the sheaf of paper in Severus' hands. "What do we need to sign?"

The agent looked him up and down. "Do you and your wife wish to be Mr. Snape's legal guardians until such time as he can safely be returned to the U.K., or becomes a legal adult – which in the U.S. wizarding world is at age seventeen, same as in the U.K.?"

"You bet your sweet bippy we do," replied Mr. Norton, who had moved to stand by Severus' side.

"Of course we do," added Mrs. Norton, taking a surprised Severus' hand in hers.

"But – but I don't want to be a burden–" Severus started to say.

"You're not a burden, son," Mr. Norton said. He put a large, work-worn hand on the boy's shoulder, and gave him a friendly smile. "You're one of the finest young men I know. And there's no way on God's green earth that I'm going to let you get sent back to a place where you're not wanted and you're in danger."

"That's right," said Mrs. Norton, squeezing Severus' hand. "Don't worry, honey. We'll take care of you, for as long as need be."

Severus found himself taking deep lungfuls of air, trying to will himself not to cry.

_These people... these good people... they want me... they like me..._

"I'll stay, then," he said, his voice a bit wobbly.

"I was hoping you'd say that," beamed Agent Kramarczuk. "Got all the paperwork right here. Now, here's a brochure for the Hiawatha Boarding School in Minneapolis..."


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter Fifteen**

_3 July 1974_

_Professor Yolanda Schneider  
__Potions Department  
__Hiawatha Boarding School  
__Minneapolis, Minnesota_

_Dear Professor Schneider:_

_My name is Severus Snape, and I am living in Norway township in Fillmore county, in the extreme southeastern corner of Minnesota. I have just completed my third year at Hogwarts in Scotland, but owing to circumstances beyond my control am now a Minnesota resident. The bearer of this letter, Agent Euphemia Kramarczuk of the United States Department of Magic, will explain everything in full. _

_I have attached my most recent Potions exam paper. Please let me know if this will be enough for me to start your ninth-grade Potions class._

_Yours sincerely,_

_Severus Snape_

**---------------------------------**

_July 3, 1974_

_Mr. Severus Snape  
__Norway Township  
__Fillmore County, Minnesota_

_Dear Mr. Snape:_

_Agent Kramarczuk has dropped off your letter and exam paper for me to read, and to explain your situation. She has also kindly agreed to deliver this return letter to you, as you are without an owl at present._

_Enclosed please find a book with this letter, Gasogene Tantalus' _Textbook of Ninth-Grade Potions_. Your summer assignment will be to prepare three potions from Chapter Eleven of the book: the Burn Healing Potion, the Nightgaunt Repellent, and Veritaserum. The necessary ingredients are also enclosed. Bring the finished potions with you when you come to your first day of class._

_I look forward to seeing you in my ninth-grade Potions class, as a teacher helper as well as a student. If you are as good in your other subjects as you are apparently at Potions, you will be an asset to the school._

_Sincerely,_

_Yolanda Schneider  
__Professor, Potions Department  
__Hiawatha Boarding School  
__Minneapolis, Minnesota_

Severus read Professor Schneider's letter over and over again as he sat on his bed later that evening, as the night breeze ruffled the curtains on the window. _An asset to the school... An asset to the school..._

He knew he'd made an impression on the professor when he heard and saw Agent Kramarczuk Apparating a second time on the lawn in front of the house, barely an hour after she'd left for Hiawatha. The D.O.M. agent had a big grin on her face, and her arms were laden with various bags, bags that turned out to be stuffed to the brim with potions supplies as well as a potions textbook.

"Schneider nearly had conniptions when she read your paper," Kramarczuk had said as Severus helped her into the house with her burdens. "She thought at first that you'd faked it. But she checked out the Integrity Spells on the parchment and then she damn near fainted. I don't know that much about potions myself, kiddo," she said, setting one of the bags down on the dining room table, "and what I did know I forgot after I took my senior-year Wizarding Apititude Tests. But I do know that Schneider's a tough nut to crack, and you've cracked her wide open. She damn near came down here herself to see you in action."

Severus found that he couldn't speak; sheer joy was causing his throat to swell up.

"But Houston, we have a problem," she said, her face suddenly losing the grin. "A big problem."

The young wizard's joy vanished as if he'd seen a Dementor. "What problem?"

"You don't have an owl, and you don't have an Apparation License."

Severus stared in sudden dismay at the field agent. "You're right – how will I communicate with the school? Or even get there?"

"We'll get you there somehow," Mr. Norton interposed.

"But how?" Severus exclaimed. "If Hiawatha's like Hogwarts, it's been made Unplottable for Muggles – you won't be able to find it." He lowered his head in despair, clenching his hands into white-knuckled fists. "What can we do?"

The grin seeped back onto Kramaczuk's face. "Well, kiddo, I have an idea."

Severus raised his head. "You do?"

"I do."

Kramarczuk looked at the young wizard, making sure his attention was riveted on her. "Now, even though I've been Apparating since I was younger than you, I'm not licensed to train young kids how to Apparate. I could lose my job over it. But," she said, raising a finger, "I can issue Apparating licenses to young persons who are already capable of Apparating. So, I want you to completely ignore everything I'm about to say and do for the next – oh, five minutes or so."

"Beg pardon, Miss?"

The grin got wider. "You heard me: Whatever I discuss, no matter how detailed or useful, _don't do it. _Now, Severus, you've heard about the way your body reacts when you start concentrating on Apparition, right?"

"Yes, Miss."

"Good. Now listen carefully. I _don't _want you to try Apparating by yourself. I _don't_ want you to concentrate on cultivating that funny tickling and rumbling feeling and almost-but-not-quite-nausea in the stomach that happens just as you're about to Apparate."

Light dawned for Severus. "I understand, Miss," he replied, getting into the spirit of things.

"Good. I especially _don't _want you to practice, say, thinking of yourself going from where you're standing and Apparating over next to the coat rack by the front door, once I've turned my back on you to gaze at this lovely kitchen for a few minutes." And with that, she winked at Severus and turned her back on him, her gaze now firmly fixed on the entryway leading to the kitchen.

Severus took a deep breath, imagined himself going exactly where Kramarczuk had told him not to go. He screwed up his face, felt the tickle in his stomach –

_...fizzle_. Not quite, but close. Agent Kramarczuk's back was still turned to him.

He tried again. He felt the tickle – then the rumble –

_...ffffizzle_. Not quite, but closer yet.

He tried yet again – felt the tickle – the rumble – the queasiness –

_CRAAAAACK!_

– and he found himself standing next to the coat rack by the front door.

Mr. and Mrs. Norton stood up from their chairs and applauded.

Kramarczuk turned around, the glee shining on her face. "What was that I just heard? A self-taught underage Apparator?" She looked Severus in the eye and put on a mock-stern face. "Now, young man, I must make sure that you didn't learn any unauthorized Apparition techniques. Were you told how to do this by any person who was not authorized to teach Apparition?"

"N-No, Miss."

"So you figured it out on your own, eh?"

"Yes, Miss."

The mock-stern look evaporated like summer mist, and the glee not only returned, but became positively manic. "Well, then, by the power invested in me as a magical field agent of the United States Government, I hereby declare you – Licensed To Apparate!"

A sheet of parchment appeared in Kramarczuk's open hand, along with a small booklet. She duly presented both items to a somewhat stunned Severus. "Tomorrow will be the perfect time to practice, it being the Fourth of July. There'll be lots of bangs going off, so no one will notice a few extra. Now go out there and knock yourself out. Or better yet, _don't _knock yourself out. Don't wanna hafta come back here and unsplinch you."

"Th-thank you, Miss."

"Don't mention it, kiddo. Now you read that booklet cover to cover – tells you what you need to know before you start doing long-distance Apparition. And have fun at Hiawatha. See you all later!"

She stepped back a foot, then waved to everyone present. There was another loud crack, and a flash, and she was gone.

--------------------------------------

Severus and Mrs. Halvorson were standing side by side at her butcher-block cutting table, chopping rosemary leaves. Or rather, Severus was standing; Mrs. Halvorson was sitting on a high stool, as standing for any length of time wasn't possible because of her gout. On the stove, a pot of water was just coming to a boil; on the counter top, a small cauldron of water with a portable magical fire under it was bubbling away. Identical sets of cooking thermometers sat in both pot and cauldron.

"This is some amazing stuff, Severus," Mrs. Halvorson said. "Those hippies must have taught you something, eh?"

"Hippies? Oh, erm, yes, yes they did," Severus replied. "Ready now? This all has to go into the water at one go."

Acting as one, they put down their knives, scooped up their respective piles of rosemary, placed them into the boiling water of both receptacles, and clamped lids on both items to keep the rosemary fumes from escaping into the air.

"There," said Severus, once the lids were secured. He reached over to set Mrs. Halvorson's egg timer. "We'll chop up the ginkgo and the periwinkle while that boils; the club moss we can toss in whole."

"Then let's do that."

They went back to chopping, Mrs. Halvorson watching Severus' every move and copying it with precision. They finished just as the egg timer went off, and then dumped everything, including the shaggy hunks of club moss, into the boiling water. Severus then reset the egg timer for another five minutes.

"We'll need to stir each batch fifty times at the five-minute mark," Severus explained as he refasted the lid on his cauldron. He then turned to make himself face Mrs. Halvorson's blue-black eyes, the eyes that saw so much now that the potion was helping her mind regain its former sharpness. "Erm, Mrs. Halvorson?"

Her eyes, so much like Julie's, met and held Severus' gaze. For a moment he felt as if he were an animal caught in a trap.

But he had something that he needed to say, and so he said it:

"I'm not a hippie." _There, I said it._ And he leaned back and waited.

Mrs. Halvorson smiled at him. "I know, dear. Julie told me."

"Ah." _I should have known._ "So... is there anything you need to know? About me, that is?"

She reached over to pat him on the arm. "Only what you want to tell me, Severus. Otherwise, don't worry about it."


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter Sixteen**

Harry watched in dismay as Professor Snape started weeping again after the fit of self-berating. Snape's closed eyes had been leaking tears, off and on, for much of the evening, and when he wasn't crying he was shouting himself hoarse, calling himself every name in the book.

Acting on instinct, Harry put a hand out to touch Snape's, to comfort him. The professor grasped it unseeingly, holding it fast.

"Dad... you don't want me, Dad... I've done horrible things... made others do horrible things... been horrible to so many people..."

After nearly a week studying Snape's freed memories, Harry knew quite a bit about the Dad to whom Professor Snape was talking. And he was pretty sure of his ground when he supplied the answer that he guessed Snape's Dad would have given:

"That's all in the past, son. And it's all because that – that aunt of yours tried to scrub out everything good about you. But she didn't get it all." He squeezed Snape's hand, and got an answering squeeze back. "You're doing your best to make amends, son. Considering what you've been through, I'm amazed you're here to do it."

"Dad..." It was a whisper now; Snape's energy was starting to run down.

It had been like this all week: He'd come to just enough to be fed, but not enough to have any real awareness of his surroundings; then, as his retrieved memories and hints of the path he could have taken started making themselves felt, he would fall into harrowing pits of self-punishment, berating himself in language and fervor that bested the worst that Harry had ever thought, much less said, about the man. These fits would last until Snape simply ran out of the strength to sustain them; then he'd fall back into unconsciousness.

"Go to sleep now, son. It'll be better when you wake up." At least, that was what Harry hoped.

"Dad..." Snape whispered a final time, then relaxed into sleep, or something like it.

Harry wished that Dumbledore would return, and soon.

-----------------------------------

Once his non-hippieness was out of the way, Severus and Mrs. Halvorson had a good time finishing up their respective batches of the memory-enhancing potion. Julie was off riding her bicycle into Rushford to pick up a few things at the hardware store – but not without giving Severus a quick peck on the cheek when she thought her grandma wasn't looking – so they had the house all to themselves.

They talked about the Muggle world, and the wizarding world. While Julie's description of the Muggle world of Minnesota was interesting, there were some gaps in her knowledge – unavoidable gaps, being that Julie was only fourteen – and Mrs. Halvorson filled in some of those gaps for Severus.

And Mrs. Halvorson did something more. She let slip a bit of information that gave Severus cause to think a bit:

"It's so good that you came to the Nortons, Severus," she said, carefully ladling her batch into a set of her own Ball jars. "They've been through some tough times in the past few years."

"They have?"

"They've been trying to make that tiny farm of theirs go for years, to get themselves off soybeans and onto things that'll turn a profit for them. Now it looks like they'll succeed in doing just that, but it was touch and go for awhile. But you helped out a lot."

"Me? I haven't really done anything."

Mrs. Halvorson made a sharp laugh. "Severus, you fixed their milking machine. That alone saved them at least a thousand dollars and a few hours of work every day. And you're helping them get their produce to market. Believe me, dear, you're helping." Mrs. Halvorson paused to look at the boy, who was wearing John Norton's shirt and jeans and even his shoes. "You're helping in ways you can't even imagine right now."

There was something odd in the way Mrs. Halvorson was looking at him. "Erm, what ways?"

Mrs. Halvorson gave him a small, tight-lipped smile. "Did you know that the Nortons had two other children besides Becky?"

Severus felt a cold chill run through him. _Had_ two other children. "No, I didn't."

"They would have been Becky's older and younger brothers, had they lived, and she would have been the middle child. But they both had a genetic disorder that killed them hours after birth. They're in the Rushford cemetery."

"That... that's awful," Severus said, when he could finally speak.

"They both wanted sons, John especially," continued Mrs. Halvorson. "But John decided that he couldn't put Sarah through another pregnancy, not when the outcome wasn't likely to be any good."

"Oh."

Severus stood for a long time, just staring at his batch of potion in the cauldron, watching it cool, and not knowing what else to say.

Then a thought hit him, and he looked up at Mrs. Halvorson in wild surmise:

"Are you saying that –"

"Yes, I am, Severus," Mrs. Halvorson finished gently for him, in a manner that made him suspect she could now read his mind as fluently as Julie could. "You're the son they've always wanted. The son they've never had, and never could have had – until now."

-----------------------------

The rest of that day, Severus thought about what Mrs. Halvorson had told him.

Now that it was pointed out to him, he thought he could feel the son-hunger, the yearning, rising up from John Norton like a shimmering, living thing. Suddenly, it was a lot easier to see why the Nortons, Becky excluded, had embraced him so readily.

Him, Severus Snape. Ugly, unwanted Severus Snape.

But he wasn't ugly to them. Or to Mrs. Halvorson. Or, most especially, to her granddaughter.

He was valued. He was wanted.

He was happy.

And he decided, from that point onward, that he would do his best to make sure that they all were happy, too. Even Becky, if he could. Though that last would be difficult, he judged.

-----------------------------------

Mr. and Mrs. Norton decided to celebrate becoming Severus' guardians by taking him to a sizable city called called Winona, some thirty-odd miles to the north, to get some new clothes of his own – clothes that hadn't first been worn by Mr. Norton.

They all piled into the Nortons' car, an old Chrysler Dodge Coronet, which was a large, blue-with-faux-wood-trim estate wagon, or what the Nortons called a "station wagon". It was roomy enough inside to seat them all in comfort, with a sufficiently wide gap between Becky and Severus in the back seat.

"Buckle up, kids," Mr. Norton called out to the denizens in the back. "Becky, show Severus how they work, okay, honey?"

"Okay, Dad," grumbled the Nortons' daughter. She turned a grumpy face towards Severus. "Okay, this is the buckle," she said, pointing to a metallic box connected to a sort of fabric strap, "and this," she continued, holding up a small metal plate at the end of another fabric strap, "slides into the buckle, like this --" She suited the action to the word, and the buckle made a small click as the metal plate slid home. "Got it, Stink?"

"Got it, Brat."

She scowled at him, and he smiled.

"Now behave, you two," said Mrs. Norton from the front seat.

"We will, Mom," replied Becky.

"We will, Ma'am," Severus said simultaneously with Becky.

_So much for my vow to be nice to Becky_, Severus thought as he leaned back in his seat.. _Oh, well, she wouldn't know what to do if I _was_ nice to her..._

It was Severus' very first time in an automobile. It was... interesting.

It felt a bit like riding on the Hogwarts Express, but then it didn't. The seats were upholstered differently, for one thing – a sort of fake leather as opposed to the soft yet durable cloth seats in the carriages of the Express. There was a bit more noise, too, both from the thrum of the engine and the hum of whatever it was that was shooting cooled air out of the vents in the front of the passenger compartment.

Deciding that Becky was best ignored, Severus instead stared out the window at the countryside that flashed by. Rolling green hills, flat river bottom lands, and small meandering streams filled his vision. Huge red barns on high stone foundations. Tall round grey metal structures. Cows, pigs and horses, and even the occasional flock of sheep. All of it under a brilliantly blue sky and a hot July sun.

It all looked rather lovely to his eyes.

After a few minutes, they left the quiet county road they were on and entered another, bigger roadway, studded with what seemed to be far too many cars moving far too fast.

Severus found himself gripping the arm rest on his door, but Mr. Norton didn't seem to be the least bit alarmed by the amount of traffic or its speed. He wove back and forth across the lanes with aplomb, going as fast if not faster than the cars around him.

As a way of trying to tamp down his nervousness, Severus forced himself to watch Mr. Norton's actions like a hawk. Because of this, the lad was able to notice a few things. For instance, Severus noted that Mr. Norton always signaled his lane changes before making them; he did this by flipping a long stick that jutted out from behind the steering wheel. Depending on how it was moved, the stick triggered flashing yellow lights on either the left or right side of the cars, according to whether Mr. Norton was moving to the right or left.

Gradually, the farms started giving way to smaller homes on smaller lots; Severus guessed that they must be in the suburbs of Winona. Then the homes themselves gave way to the city of Winona itself, with all sorts of shops and businesses. Mr. Norton drove north through the city, stopping at last to point the wagon into a large car park near an even larger building that looked like it had to be a very big shop of some sort.

"Here we are, son," he said to Severus, as he pulled into one of the few available parking spaces near what had to be the front entrance of the giant shop. The word "Sears" hung on the wall over the double glass doors in letters that Severus guessed were at least ten feet high. It was only one storey, but it was sprawling, taking up nearly two acres by Severus' estimation.

They entered the store, which was every bit as big inside as it looked outside. And it seemed to sell everything a Muggle might need: Clothes of all kinds, shoes, household goods, mechanical washing machines, and a whole host of things whose purpose Severus simply couldn't divine.

Severus had decided beforehand that he was only going enough clothing for two complete changes of clothes. But the Nortons were having none of that.

They gleefully ran up and down the aisles, taking things off the racks, hangers and all, and handed them to an increasingly stunned young wizard. Even Becky was taking a part in it, treating him as if he were a life-sized version of one of her Ken dolls that she could dress up. Before they were done, Severus was staggering under the load of two pairs of jeans, two pairs of shorts, two sets of trousers made from some synthetic material, two short-sleeved golfer's shirts, two long-sleeved linen shirts, one polo neck jumper (or "turtleneck sweater", as the Americans called it), and a full formal suit complete with necktie. At least they spared him having to carry around the eight pairs of socks, eight Y-fronts and eight undershirts.

_Merlin's beard_, he thought as he walked along, barely able to see over the pile of clothes in his arms. _They really_ are _treating me like a son._

Once the clothes were purchased, they dropped off the clothes in the back of the station wagon before heading off in search of a quick lunch before heading back home. Mr. Norton was pulling out a large woolen blanket to put over the shopping bags, so that they wouldn't be as noticeable to any criminally-minded passersby.

Severus had a better idea. "Erm, Mr. Norton? May I try something?"

Mr. Norton looked up at Severus, then at the throngs of people all around them. "All right. But hold on a minute." He motioned to Mrs. Norton and to Becky. "We're going to stand between him and anyone that could see him."

"I was just about to suggest that," replied Mrs. Norton, who had already moved to flank Severus.

Once Severus was hidden from view, Mr. Norton gave him the nod. Severus pulled out his wand and muttered a quick spell. Mr. Norton found himself blinking.

"Uh, what did you do, son?" Mr. Norton asked, shaking his head as if to knock the dust out of it.

"Disillusionment Charm," Severus replied. "The bags will blend in with the inside of the wagon, and no one will see them. It'll last until we get home." Home. Yes, home. This was home for him now.

"Wonderful, son," beamed Mr. Norton, clapping Severus on the shoulder. "Let's go get some grub."

And that is what they did, at a Chinese restaurant nearby. Severus had sweet-and-sour chicken with cream cheese wontons and fried rice, a meal he decided was fit for a king.

After that, it was time for the drive home, so Mr. Norton could do the second milking of the day. Severus was so stuffed from the food, and so exhausted from the shopping, that he didn't bother to respond when Becky called him "El Stinkeroo" once they were all in the car and speeding back towards the farm. The warm sun coming in from the car windows contributed to his lethargy, and soon he was asleep, his body held in place by the seat belt.

He stayed asleep all the way to Norway township.


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter Seventeen**

"Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, an' a pair is six. Have some more shortcake, Effie?"

"Please, Sarah. With lots of cream on top."

"Comin' right up, Effie. Watch her so she doesn't move my pegs, John," Sarah Norton said as she got up from her chair.

Effie blew her a raspberry.

Agent Euphemia Kramarczuk, of the U.S. Department of Magic, was a very busy woman. But she also was fond of good homemade food, good people, and a good game of cribbage. And it was her part of her job to check in on rural underage magic-users, especially those in Muggle households. Her occasional visits to the Norton household allowed her to drop off some extra potions supplies for Severus (he was going through ginkgo and periwinkle and club moss like it was going out of style, the poor kid!), and to mix business with pleasure to the satisfaction of all concerned.

She normally wouldn't have been back more than once that summer to visit Severus and his Muggle guardians, but this was a special situation.

It seemed that Severus' presence had managed to trigger a tiny bit of latent magic in a young Muggle girl living with her grandmother next door. The girl would never be able to cast a spell on her own, but she could mentally commune with the young British wizard, which was remarkable in and of itself.

_And_, Effie smiled to herself, _where she got her magic from was even more remarkable..._

-----------------------------------------

It had happened on the afternoon after the trip to Winona.

Severus and Julie, fresh from helping Mr. Norton with the truck patch, were over at Mrs. Halvorson's place, learning to make lefse, a traditional Norwegian flatbread made from cooked and mashed potatoes that had come from her small garden behind the house. Hjordis was in the habit of making up huge batches of the stuff and giving it out as gifts to her friends, family, neighbors and anyone else she could catch. Severus had been given a sample of the finished product, rolled up and filled with lingonberries; he had to admit that it was one of the better things one could do with potatoes.

Mrs. Halvorson could no longer stand for any length of time, but Severus now could see where she got her strong arms. During the mashing, he watched with amazement as Mrs. Halvorson sat on her high stool and popped the large peeled spuds into the potato ricer, squeezing them faster than an eyeblink into long thin strands with no more trouble than if they had been lumps of warm butter. Severus had tried it himself, and found himself stopping to massage his hands after the fifth potato. Julie could only manage three before giving up and settling for mashing the potatoes that had been riced yesterday and then stored in the fridge.

"They roll out better if you give 'em a day to cool after they're riced," Julie explained as she set the large covered bowl on the kitchen table. "And mashing them now removes any lumps that might be left, and you wanna get out all the lumps before you add the flour."

Severus soon found that rolling out stiff lefse dough to the desired thickness – or rather, thinness – was somewhat challenging in itself. If the dough got close to room temperature, it became very difficult to handle.

_Oh, well. Time for a little Cooling Charm_, he decided.

"Mrs. Halvorson," he said.

The stout old woman turned towards him, and looked at him with those sharp eyes of hers. "Yes, Severus?"

"May I... try a bit of magic?"

Mrs. Halvorson smiled. "Go right ahead, dear," she said.

He thought he could hear Julie gasp next to him. Or maybe it was the mental gasp from her that he'd registered. Yes, Julie had told her gran that he was a wizard. But this would be the first time that he'd actually, well, demonstrated it in front of the lady.

With both Julie and Mrs. Halvorson watching his every move, the boy wizard unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt. He then pulled his wand out from inside his shirt, from the chamois-leather-and-elastic wand holster Mrs. Norton had made for him.

"_Frigidio minimus!_" he called out, pointing his wand at the bowl of dough. A thin blue beam shot out from the wand and encircled the bowl for the briefest of moments. It then dissipated, leaving a slight coating of condensation on the outside of the bowl.

"Oh, my," said Mrs. Halvorson. She leaned over from her perch on the stool and touched the side of the mixing bowl for a second. She nodded knowingly as she pulled away her fingertips, now slightly damp from the condensation.

"That's a very good ability to have, Severus," she said, twisting herself on the stool so she could face him. "Did you learn it, or could you always do it?"

"Both, actually," he said, putting his wand away back inside his shirt. "What I mean is, I've always had the ability to use the spell, once it was taught to me."

"Hmmm. And you can talk with Julie?" Her face suddenly scrunched up as if she were in pain.

_...talk like this?..._

It was a whisper compared to Julie's near-shout, but it was there.

_Erm, yes I can, Ma'am_, he replied in kind, and with considerably less effort than she'd exerted.

Mrs. Halvorson clapped her hands together and laughed. "Good for you, dear! I thought that Julie and I were the only ones alive who could do that trick." She looked over at her smiling granddaughter. Severus thought he caught the faintest suggestion of a message being exchanged, but couldn't quite make it out. Whatever it was, it suddenly caused Julie's smile to get even wider.

"Severus," Julie said, "Gran'd like to show you something else she can do, if you wouldn't mind." _You'll just love this_, she whispered to him mentally.

"Erm... all right." _What?_

"Super!" _Don't worry. Just watch and don't interrupt Gran, okay?_

_Okay..._

Julie turned to her grandmother. After a moment, her grandmother nodded.

Julie walked over to the large wooden block where her grandmother stored all her knives. She pulled out a small paring knife.

Severus had a sick feeling about what was to come next. _Julie, no!_

"Don't worry, Severus – it'll be all right. Watch."

With the knife in her right hand, Julie turned over the forearm on her left, so it was facing upwards. Then, ever so carefully, she cut herself an inch-long gash right on the inside of her forearm, two inches or so below the elbow.

_JULIE!_

Julie's eyes pinned and held Severus in place. "Severus, watch. It's OK, you'll see." She turned to her grandmother, holding the cut and bleeding arm out for her to inspect. Severus felt as if he were watching some ancient blood ritual, and he suddenly had a vision of Hjordis as an old Norse wise-woman, preparing a thrall for sacrifice.

But sacrifice was not what happened.

Mrs. Halvorson calmly put her hand over the wound and closed her eyes. Her face contorted in a grimace, and her hand trembled slightly. Even standing where he was, Severus could feel a power of some sort flowing from her into her granddaughter.

And when she pulled her hand away, the cut was gone. Not just sealed up, but gone.

Julie looked up smugly at an astonished Severus. "See, I_ told_ you it would be OK."

Severus looked at the spot where the cut was, then at Mrs. Halvorson. Then he looked back at the spot, and then again at Mrs. Halvorson.

"You're a bloodstopper, aren't you?" was the first coherent thing he could think of saying.

Mrs. Halvorson smiled. "You betcha, sonny. Been one since I was a little girl." She looked over at Julie, who smiled back at her. "I was hoping Julie would be one, too, but she hasn't showed the signs yet. But she and I – and you – can mind-talk. And that's close enough for Government work."

"And no American wizarding people ever came for you?"

"Nope. Well, actually," Mrs. Halvorson said, correcting herself, "one did. But when I held the wand he gave me to hold, I couldn't so much as shoot off a spark. So they wrote me as just a bloodstopper and left it at that."

Now it was Julie's turn to be astonished. "Gran," she said, half outraged, "you never told me about that!"

"Didn't think you'd believe me. And it was so long ago. But I've told you now, both of you."

Light was dawning for Severus, on many things. "That was why you became a nurse, wasn't it, Ma'am?"

"Ah-hum. It was wartime, I wasn't really trained, but they had programs and they needed bodies. They put me in a nurse's uniform almost before I knew how to swab an arm for a tetanus shot." Her eyes got a faraway look to them. "It was okay then, it was wartime, the guys at the front wouldn't say anything. Nobody was going to get the heebie-jeebies over somebody who was just a little bit better at healing things than the next gal. Besides, they were all local boys, I knew most of them back home. But then I got caught in a red-tape snafu." 

"Snafu?"

Hjordis snorted. "The fancy term is 'bureaucratic error'. I was transferred, for no particular reason, to a Stateside hospital, barely three months after I went overseas. Couldn't get un-transferred. Didn't do as well there. Too many doctors were wondering why too many people with knife and gun wounds suddenly were turning up without a scratch on them the next day."

She stopped for a long moment, a moment in which Severus could hear the hum of the machine he now knew was an air-conditioner, coming from the parlor. "So I came back to the farm. Got married, helped my late husband Oscar – that's him on the mantel in the parlor, in the big leather frame; we were just starting to go out when that picture was taken – well, I helped him run the farm, raise a bunch of kids, watched them grow up and have kids of their own; they weren't much older than you and Julie when they did, but they're all doing fine." She smiled at Severus then, and if he wasn't already sure that she would give them her blessing, he knew now. "Later on, I volunteered at some of the local nursing homes, the ones that had the vets from the war in them. I knew they'd never talk. But that stopped when I got the gout and my memory went kerflooey."

Severus looked at Mrs. Halvorson. Here was a woman who wanted nothing more than to be useful, who was put on this earth to work, to heal, to make things better. And yet for most of her life, she wasn't allowed to use her most potent gift. But her magic wasn't the kind that could be channeled into other uses.

It could, however, be passed on. And if what he'd suspected was the case, then any moment now –

_CRRAAAACK!_

Three heads whipped around to look out of Mrs. Halvorson's kitchen window. A woman in a smartly-tailored three-piece suit and a straw boater on her head was standing just outside, peering at them through dark-rimmed cat-eye glasses. She looked down at a piece of parchment in her hand, then back up at Mrs. Halvorson, who was motioning at her to come inside the house.

_CRRACCCK!_

The woman was now in the kitchen, standing next to the refrigerator, looking somewhat perplexed. Then she saw Severus, and laughed.

"Never a dull moment with you around, kiddo," she said.

"Which one of us set off the alarm?" asked Severus,

"You all did," she replied, setting her briefcase out in front of her on an imaginary invisible shelf.

"We all did?"

"Ah-humm. By the way," she said, lifting up head, "I should probably introduce myself to your friends. Mrs. Halvorson, I'm Euphemia Kramarczuk of the United States Department of Magic..."


	18. Chapter 18

**Chapter Eighteen**

The bicycle had been waiting for him in the back yard when he came back from helping Mr. Norton with the berries. It was mid-July now, and while the strawberries were finished for the year, the blueberries and raspberries were at their peak; there had been a lot of them to freeze that hazy, humid summer afternoon.

Mrs. Norton was going over the bicycle with a rag, polishing what parts of it were amenable to polishing. A basket was mounted on each side of the rear wheel.

"Sorry about all the dirt," she said, even though Severus could not see a speck of dirt anywhere on the thing. "I picked it up at an estate sale over in Bratsberg. Tires are in good shape, and the internal hub mechanism's intact. Rides pretty good."

"Erm, what's it for?" he asked, looking at the contraption.

"You, Severus," replied Mrs. Norton.

"... But why?"

Mrs. Norton gave him a small smile. "Because you're not yet old enough for a driver's license, and Apparating everywhere will make folks suspicious."

"Ah." He paused a moment. "Driver's license?"

"Yes, for a car."

"An automobile?"

"Uh-huh. You can get a farm work license when you turn fifteen, which allows you to drive so long as you do it in the daytime, stay within twenty miles of home, and don't try to drive in a big city. And when you turn sixteen, you can get a full license that lets you drive anywhere."

"An automobile..." Severus stared off at nothing in particular. "I never imagined I'd ever be driving a car..."

"It's a necessity out here, honey, what with everything being so far away from everything else." She stood up and pushed the bicycle out towards him. "But you don't have to think about that just yet. Think about this instead."

Severus looked at the bicycle, all hunks and curves of metal and rubber and blue paint. It was obviously old, but aside from a few dents and scratches, it looked well cared for. The leather saddle was worn yet sleek, an invitation and a rebuke. He had sudden memories of his first day of broom lessons, and the shame he felt as the Cleansweep had sent him tumbling to the ground in front of a laughing Sirius Black...

It all scared him more than anything else had in his time here at the farm.

"I – I've never ridden a bicycle in my life," he said quietly.

"You haven't?"

"I haven't."

"Oh, it's very easy, honey. Here, I'll show you."

Mrs. Norton dropped her polishing cloth on the ground and threw a jean-clad leg over the bike, straddling it as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to do. She slid onto the leather seat, gripped the handlebars, put her feet on the pedals, and sent herself and the bicycle scooting slowly and gracefully around the yard.

_Well, at least it sticks to two dimensions_, Severus thought morosely_. It can't drop me from a great height like a Cleansweep can._

"And to stop, you just pedal backwards, like this." She suited the action to the word, and the machine came to a halt. She put a foot out to touch the ground and stay upright. "It's really very easy."

"Sure it is," said Mr. Norton, coming out from the kitchen, where he'd stopped to wash up after a dusty day in the fields. "C'mon, son. We'll teach you the same way we taught Becky."

Severus frowned. He'd forgot that Becky had a little bike of her own, one which she used to zip around to the neighbors and back. If Becky could do it, he certainly could.

And then he remembered Julie.

Julie had a bicycle. If he could learn to ride, he could ride with her, everywhere she went...

"All right," he said.

The smile on John Norton's face turned into a full-fledged grin. "Okay, son. Sarah'll stand on one side, I'll be on the other."

"We'll be holding you up, Severus," added Mrs. Norton. "We won't let you fall, we promise."

Severus looked at the Nortons, looked from one of their shining faces to the other, and in that moment he knew he could believe them.

He walked over to the bike, which Mrs. Norton was holding out towards him as she had before. Cautiously, he swung a leg over the frame. When that went successfully, he slid himself onto the seat. So far, so good.

Mr. Norton came up on his right side, and Mrs. Norton on his left. They each put an arm around Severus' waist, holding him steady.

"We'll just start you out by having you go forward about twenty feet. Then, when we say 'stop', you start pedaling in reverse to stop the bike. Got it?"

"Got it, sir," Severus replied, in an almost-calm voice.

"Put your hands on the handlebars, honey," Mrs. Norton said. "That's how you steer."

Severus tried to control his breathing. He wasn't going to panic, not here. Not now. Not when the Nortons could feel his panic through his ribcage. Slowly, he put his hands on the handlebar grips. Mrs. Norton gave him a little squeeze.

"Okay, son," said Mr. Norton. "Now put your feet on the pedals."

Severus did so. Now he was being held up solely by the Nortons. His heart thudded like a hammer on an anvil, and he found himself staring at his feet.

"All right, son. Start pedaling."

Severus was fighting the urge to hyperventillate when he felt a sudden presence flowing under him and around him, making him feel light and warm and protected.

_Julie._

She had apparently felt his distress and come outside to investigate. He looked up and saw her, her beautiful smile beckoning him to move, to come to her, to pedal the bike to her.

_Don't worry, Severus. They won't let you fall. _**I **_won't let you fall. I love you._

Severus' feet started to move of their own accord, pushing the pedals around and around. The bike moved, and the Nortons moved with it, balancing Severus between them as he felt himself being lifted and pulled towards a slender, dark-haired girl with eyes the color of star sapphires..

_I love you too, Julie._

She smiled at him as he, the bike, and the Nortons drew nearer_. I know you do, Severus._

He found himself grinning from ear to ear.

Five minutes later, he was pedaling unassisted, and still grinning from ear to ear.

------------------------------

Now that Severus had a bike, he and Julie rode together nearly every day. He couldn't go very far at first, but by the end of July he was following Julie out to Rushford and back, a twenty-mile round trip on hilly terrain where he got to discover the uses of an internal hub shifter – especially on the return trip, as Rushford was located deep in the Root River Valley while the Norton and Halvorson places were perched atop a high green rolling bluff top a good five hundred feet higher up in altitude. Now he understood how Julie kept so trim despite having such a hearty appetite...

When going to Rushford, they most often went to the Tew Public Library, a small, well-built two-story brick structure next to the City Hall, but they usually also did a few errands for either Julie's gran or the Nortons. The shopkeepers had given him a few odd looks at first – he suspected that had to do with his longish hair and his English accent – but after a while they knew and greeted him by name, just as they did Julie. The librarians were even friendlier, having sensed in them fellow book-lovers; they sent Severus home with reference books on chemistry and plant biology and the like.

It was a bit of a shock to be treated so well by so many people, but Severus was starting to get used to it.

----------------------------------------

Severus sat and stared at the Mason jar on his bedside table. It was his allowance jar, and it currently had three dollars and twenty-six cents in it.

The Nortons had insisted on giving him a weekly stipend that they called an "allowance". He had protested strongly at first – he hadn't seen what he'd done to earn such a thing – but gave in when he realized that he could use the money to buy things for Julie and himself when they went into town. Little things mostly, like soda pops and ice cream cones, though for the magnificent sum of fifteen cents he once bought her an old paperback copy of _Antony and Cleopatra _that was sitting in the "withdrawn" pile over at the library, and which she'd been looking at wistfully.

Still, he made sure that he earned the money. He was already getting free room and board; this "allowance" business on top of all that was a bit much, by his lights. He made sure that he was out in the fields at least two to three hours of every day, when he wasn't with Julie. And when he was with Julie, he often was helping her and her gran with something or other.

He would earn his keep, he vowed to himself as he balanced the Arithmancy textbook on his lap. He would do his best to be worthy of all the pains the Nortons and the Halvorsons had taken on his behalf. He would go to Hiawatha with samples of each potion that Professor Schneider had asked him to brew, and include samples of other potions into the bargain. Whatever he was doing now, he would do better in future.

Above all, he wanted to be able to get a position with a local wizarding apothecary, preferably before he was graduated from Hiawatha, so that he could go to Julie's parents and show them that their new son-in-law-to-be was no slacker.

A new thought brought him up short: What if they didn't want their daughter marrying a wizard? It bothered him for all of about three seconds, until he realized that with Julie's gran on his side, and she was, it really didn't matter who else approved or disapproved.

And with that pleasant thought, he put away the Arithmancy book and got ready for bed.

----------------------

"He's talking to himself again, professor," Harry whispered to Dumbledore as he came into Snape's bedroom. Dumbledore nodded his snowy-white head.

"Still the same subject matter, Harry?"

"Yes. Except now... well, it sounds barking mad, sir..."

"Yes, Harry?"

"He's talking to someone, and whoever it is, seems to be answering him."

Dumbledore raised his eyebrows. "I see."


	19. Chapter 19

**Chapter Nineteen**

Severus had just finished his third pancake of the morning -- he never realized how much he could eat until he started living a Muggle farm life -- when he noticed how quiet everything had become at the breakfast table.

He looked up and over at Mr. Norton, who had just cleaned off his own plate. Mr. Norton was looking at Severus as if he had something he wanted to say. So was Mrs. Norton. So was Becky.

And Severus knew what it was.

"Severus, we've got something we'd all like to ask you --" Mr. Norton began.

"The answer is yes."

Mr. Norton's eyes went wide, losing their squint for once. "'_Yes!_'"

"Yes, I'd very much like for you to adopt me as your son." Severus said, a good deal more calmly than he felt. "That was the question, wasn't it?"

There was a short bout of silence, as Mr. and Mrs. Norton looked at Severus, then at each other, with their mouths all a-gape. Then Mr. Norton's face blossomed like a flower. The sheer happiness in it could have lit up the night sky.

"Yes, yes it was, son." Mr. Norton's eyes watered and shined, and he dabbed at them with a napkin. "'Scuse me, got something in my eye." Everyone else's eyes were shining, too, shining and happy, even Becky's.

"I _told_ you he already knew, Dad," Becky said, elbowing her father good-naturedly in the ribs. "Stink knows everything."

"How _did_ you know, son?" asked a pleasantly surprised Mr. Norton.

"I heard you talking about it with Effie the other day," Severus said, grinning like a Cheshire cat with cream. "Somebody needs to tell her that her whisper carries much farther than her normal speaking voice."

Mr. Norton laughed so hard, the table shook.

"Then you probably know that Effie's cobbled up some documents for the local authorities – the Muggle authorities – too, " he said, once he could trust himself to talk properly. "Since you obviously didn't have a birth certificate on you when you came here."

Severus nodded. "Yes, that was good of her."

Mr. Norton leaned forward in the old wooden kitchen chair, causing it to squeak slightly. "And she gets along well with the local sheriff, the judge, and the medical examiner, so she was able to get them all to accept you – or at least the papers she made for you – as a naturalized citizen."

While Mr. Norton was talking, Mrs. Norton had got up from her chair and left the kitchen. She came back holding a manila folder and a ballpoint pen.

"Effie made these up for you, Severus," she said, handing him the folder and the pen. "The forms are set up magically; all you have to do is to sign your name to them and they're good to go, both with our government and the Department of Magic. The signature will automatically appear on the copies that Effie and the folks at the courthouse have."

Severus opened up the folder and looked at its contents. There were documents on parchment, wizard-fashion, and printed forms on standard American Muggle eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch paper. All of them had at least one spot where a signature block was outlined in glowing green ink.

"So whaddya gonna call yourself, Stink?" Becky said, jumping up and down beside him like a ping-pong ball in a washing machine. "Besides 'Norton'?"

"Hmmm..." It was actually a good question.

On the one hand, he didn't want to get rid of his given name; it was one of the few things he still had from his mother. On the other hand, he would be more than happy to shed the surname given unwillingly to him by a man who only grudgingly admitted his role in creating him.

He thought about it for a few moments. Then, he took up the pen and started signing his new name in bold, flashing strokes. It seemed a bit clumsy at first, but the signature felt more and more natural to him with each document he signed.

From now on, he would be, legally, Severus John Prince Norton, son of John Bennett Norton.

John Norton would be his father. John Norton_ wanted_ to be his father. John Norton went to very great lengths to become his father.

Severus had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep the tears from starting down his face. It was the happiest day of his young life.

----------------------------

Keeping them sorted in his head proved to be easier than he'd hoped.

"Dad" was of course John Norton, that was simple enough. Severus had never called Tobias Snape anything but the formal, distance-signifying "Father". But now, _now_ Severus had a Dad, an actual Dad, a Dad who wanted him. And so Dad John Norton was and Dad he would remain.

Sarah Norton was a little trickier. He loved her very much, nearly as much as Dad, but she wasn't his Mum. That was and would always be Eileen Prince. (Severus had long since stopped thinking of her with her husband's surname.) But he could call Sarah "Mom", which was American and was like a Mum, yet just different enough. Yes, that would work.

And Becky... Becky was still "Brat" most of the time, just as he was still "Stink" to her most of the time. That never changed, and Severus accepted it.

_All in all, it was a very good situation_, he thought as he walked out that afternoon with Dad to learn how to start and to drive the big John Deere tractor. _A very good situation, indeed._

------------------------------

Lying uneasily in his bed in his bedchambers, Professor Snape's physical form seemed to the outside observer to be secure enough, though obviously tormented by whatever he was thinking and feeling. But in his mind, in a realm unreachable by normal mortal means, Severus Snape was falling to his doom, screaming as he went.

The laughter of the Dark Lord rang inescapably in Severus' ears as he hurtled dazedly through the ether. "You thought to trick me, Severus. So foolish of you..."

The Pain Curse came shooting from the Dark Lord's wand -- and stopped about ten feet from Severus' chest, the energy fizzling out as if it had hit a brick wall.

"_What! _You _dare_ to defy me, Severus Snape! _Crucio!_"

And again, the energy stopped and fizzled well before it came near Severus' helpless form.

A mechanical hum could be heard. A man on a tractor appeared. He was carrying a shotgun. So were the two women walking alongside, one a short-haired blonde, the other a wavy-haired light brunette. They were all looking at the Dark Lord, and if mere looks could have killed, he would have shriveled and died on the spot.

Voldemort whirled around to face them, just in time to hear three simultaneous roars, and feel three loads of buckshot in his mid-section. The Dark Lord doubled over in pain and distraction.

"No one messes with Stink but me!" shrilled the younger of the women, reloading her shotgun.

Suddenly, the voices of two other women could be heard wafting through the ether, like whispers in the winds at first, but slowly getting stronger.

The first, young and light: "We won't let you fall, Severus. _I_ won't let you fall, Severus. I love you."

The second, old and powerful: "No one harms my grandson-in-law, Buster. _Nobody_. Not while I'm around."

Severus felt the energy behind the first voice become a warm, soft pink blanket between him and the Dark Lord, lifting him, cushioning him, protecting him. _Julie?..._

_I told you I wouldn't let you fall, Severus. Ever. _

_Julie, he'll hurt you... he's too strong... _

_No, he's not. Gran's taking his worst efforts and grinning._

_Hjordis?... Hjordis is here?..._

The scene suddenly changed, and they were all in what looked to be a small room. Julie was still a pink mist surrounding Severus, but Hjordis had now assumed a human form, that of an old, gout-ridden woman in a walker. The Dark Lord squinted his slitted eyes at her and laughed.

"Pathetic old biddy, do you think you can defeat me?"

Hjordis smiled, and held up a liver-spotted hand. In the hand was a small gold locket.

"Give that to me, woman!" thundered the Dark Lord.

Hjordis' hand closed around the locket. A potato ricer appeared in her other hand, and Hjordis popped the little hunk of gold into it, her strong hands shooting the locket through the device just like it was another cooked spud.

A blast of white light shot from the destroyed locket, overwhelming everyone and everything.

As Severus was thrown back out of the ether, back into the normal places inhabited by sleeping people, his last thought was: _But I didn't marry Julie... or did I?_


	20. Chapter 20

**Chapter Twenty**

"I think I've figured it out," said Euphemia Kramarczuk, right in the midst of a cribbage hand over at Hjordis Halvorson's dining-room table.

"Figured out what, Effie?" John Norton had been in the midst of moving his pegs on the cribbage board, but he stopped to look up at Effie when he heard the odd tone in her voice.

"How Severus got to be here."

It turned out to be a fairly complicated explanation, much of which had to do with geography – namely, that of Fillmore County.

As Effie told it, the extreme southeastern corner of Minnesota, where Fillmore County was situated, was part of a four-state section of land known to Muggle geologists as "the Driftless Area." It got that name because unlike most of the rest of North America at that latitude, no glaciers, during any of the Ice Ages, had ever touched the area.

This was important because of the scouring action that giant glacial ice sheets had on a landscape. Plant species, animal species, topsoil, magical outgrowths – everything was swept away to be replaced by something new once the glaciers retreated. This happened more than once in North America; some places were scoured nearly half a dozen times.

But this scouring never happened in the Driftless Area. As a consequence, certain exotic plants grew here that grew nowhere else in the region – or in some cases, the world. And there was something else that didn't get scoured away, either: The two-billion-year buildup of magical power loci. In areas of Minnesota where the glaciers had been, the natural magic was generally relatively weak and uniform in content. In the Driftless Area, it was strong and varied, with multiple strains whose existence stretched back tens of millions of years, if not longer.

"That's why there are more Muggle-born witches and wizards in this part of the state than anywhere else, I figure," Effie said, setting down her lemonade.

"You mean like Hjordis and Julie?" Mrs. Norton said.

"Yup. And what's more, the magic in the area's strong enough to act as a lodestone. It pulls loose magic to itself, so long as the magic's of the right kind."

"How does this explain Severus, though?" asked Mr. Norton.

Effie's thin lips pursed as she thought through what she was going to say. "Well, even though Hjordis and Julie will never be strong enough to cast any spells – at least, I don't think they'll ever get that strong, though it could happen – their magical type, their 'signature', is not only the same as that of the most powerful magical strand here in the Driftless Area... it also happens to be the same as Severus'."

"You mean," Julie said, "that Gran and I _brought _him here?"

"Well," said Effie, grinning cheerfully, "you had a bit a' help, what with the background radiation being the same as his and all. But yeah, you and your grandma probably tipped the scales."

Julie turned to Severus, who was standing open-mouthed by her side. "I_ knew_ it," she said smugly. "It was_ fate_."

"Naw, it was magic," corrected Agent Kramarczuk, who then took another swig of Hjordis' homemade lemonade.

----------------------

It was the middle of August, and the pace was starting to pick up at the Norton farm. There was a drought going on in much of the rest of the United States, but it had yet to touch Minnesota, and so everything was growing much as it should, if not better.

The vegetables in the truck patch were ripening along with the berries, and Mrs. Norton and Julie and Mrs. Halvorson were kept busy in Hjordis' kitchen, canning and freezing what they could. (Severus was a big help in the freezing department.)

The apples in the Nortons' backyard were ready for harvest, most of them being turned into juice and cider and applesauce, with some left over for the occasional pie. The material left over from juice or cider pressing became apple pomace, and as such was fed to the cows and the chickens; it was quite good for them, and very well received by them. The beans wouldn't be ready for another month yet, but they still needed checking. And the raspberries and blueberries were producing by the bushelful every day, almost every hour. It was a good thing that Severus had long since finished off his schoolwork, including his potions for Professor Schneider; he found himself out in the fields with Dad and Becky much of the time, and when he wasn't there, he was usually over at the Halvorsons' place, helping out with the canning.

In the outside world, Nixon had finally resigned, allowing Gerald Ford to take over and the world to breathe a sigh of relief. Finally freed of worrying about having to stop an imminent nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union, the Department of Magic turned its attention once again towards Britain and their "Voldemort problem". This meant that Effie was busier than ever before, but she still made time to stop in and check on both Severus and Julie. And of course, if during the course of her visit she happened to be offered a slice of hot apple pie, smothered in freshly whipped cream – well, she wasn't going to be a bad guest and turn it down.

"Hey," she said one evening, between bites of Sarah Norton's apple pie, "the State Fair's coming up."

"Yeah, it is," averred John. "We're probably going to go this Sunday. We'll be heading out right after I give the girls a milking so Bernie down the way only has to do it once for me while we're out. What, will you all have an exhibit there?" he teased.

Effie made a short laugh. "I wish. Nah, we're just going to do things like make sure no wizarding idiot tries to detattoo the Tattooed Lady or sneak a real mooncalf into the oddities exhibit on the Midway." She turned towards Severus, who was uncharacteristically disregarding his own plate with pie on it to give Effie a somewhat quizzical look. "You'd love the Fair, Sev – lots of things to do and to see, and it's great for people-watching. Nearly a hundred thousand people a day visit the place, people from all over."

The thought of being among a hundred thousand hot and sweaty persons didn't sound very appealing to Severus. "A hundred thousand people?"

Effie smiled. "Don't worry, they're spread out over a few hundred acres. The Fairgrounds are almost ten times the size of your dad's spread."

"Oh, it's fun, Severus," Julie said, giving his hand a squeeze. _And I'll be with you the whole time, I promise. It'll be a chance to be by ourselves for much of the day..._

Severus' eyebrows went up._ It will?_

_Yes, it will. We can go off by ourselves and then meet back up with your folks around lunchtime, or whenever..._

"Well... all right."

Julie beamed at him.

They all rode up in the station wagon for the long drive to Saint Paul, because it was much roomier than Hjordis' old Ford two-door car. The morning was cool and dry, but the clear skies presaged a scorcher later on; Severus cast a Cooling Charm inside the car so Dad wouldn't have to run the air conditioner, which was a drag on the car's already-low gas mileage -- no small thing when petrol cost nearly a dollar a gallon, three times what it had when Dad bought the wagon just a few years earlier.

Becky was up front with Dad and Mom, as she was small enough to fit comfortably between the two of them. Hjordis, Severus and Julie sat in the back seat, there being a bit more room for them there. Mrs. Halvorson's wheelchair was folded up in the rear compartment of the wagon; she normally didn't like to use it, but the Fairgrounds was simply too big for her walker to be convenient, and in a wheelchair she could propel herself with her strong arms faster than most people could jog.

"It'll be so good to see Mom and Dad again," Julie sighed happily as John Norton drove the Coronet through Rushford on State Route 43. "Phone calls are OK, but still... And they'll get to see you, too," she said, looking at Severus.

"Yes, yes, they will," Severus agreed, more to say something audibly than for any other reason. They knew that everyone else knew that they could mind-talk, but they didn't want to rub it in their faces. "They seemed friendly enough on the phone."

Severus had in fact talked at length on the telephone with Julie's parents. (This was in itself rather strange to him; the household he'd grown up in had possessed a telephone, but Severus could count the number of times he saw it used on the fingers of one hand. But American Muggles apparently spent a good portion of their lives chatting on the phone about everything under the sun, and some things that weren't.)

Her parents knew who he was, and what he was, and were so far comfortable with the idea; any possible qualms they might have had vanished when they found out that he was the one who had given Hjordis back her mind, and of course Hjordis herself had nothing but praise for him. They would be attending the Fair as well, meeting the Nortons at the entrance gate by Machinery Hill.

_I have a girlfriend_, Severus thought to himself, as quietly as he could behind the mental privacy barrier he had learned to construct. _A Muggle-born girlfriend. And I'm going to meet her Muggle parents. And they like me, or are at the least prepared to like me..._

He had to keep from pinching himself as he sat in the speeding car.

The farther north and west they drove, the more Severus noticed subtle changes in the terrain. The stubby pin oak trees vanished once they were north of Rochester on Highway 52; in their place were taller, more conventional-looking oaks. The land was flatter, less riven by brook and river valleys; where it wasn't being farmed, there were long stretches of lightly-wooded grassland, and the occasional lake and/or what Severus thought of as fenland, but what the people here called "wetlands".

There seemed to be more people, too. Even not counting Rochester, which was a major city by Minnesota standards (it had nearly ninety thousand people), there were more towns and bigger towns as they came northwards, towns with exotic names like Oronoco, Pine Island, Zumbrota, Wanamingo, and Cannon Falls.

Severus had spent his first years in Nottingham, so he wasn't totally unfamiliar with what big cities were like. But from age eleven onward he had lived mostly at Hogwarts, which was situated in a remote, isolated corner of Scotland, where for ten months out of the year he saw no one besides the same few hundred students and staff members. And for the last few weeks, aside from the trip to Winona, he'd not been near a city larger than Rushford and its two thousand-odd souls. Now, it almost seemed as if the very terrain itself was conspiring to slowly prepare him for the relative immensity of the Twin Cities, and the State Fair.

About an hour and a half north of Rochester, entering the almost-exurb of Rosemount, the towns were big enough and closely spaced enough so that the farms and wooded grasslands now seemed to be just brief interruptions in a city and suburban landscape. They drove past a golf course, a sure sign of increasing population. The traffic on the road increased as well.

Soon the farms completely gave way to parks and tract housing, each house on its own eighty-by-forty-foot lot surrounded by a green lawn, with a small knot of apartment blocks and commercial buildings every so often. Then they approached South Saint Paul; Highway 52 was now crammed with vehicles, but that didn't seem to bother Dad, hopped from lane to lane, cheerfully dodging huge eighteen-wheeled lorries while Severus felt himself gripping Julie's hand tighter than usual.

They crossed the famous Mississippi River, busy with barge and pleasure boats; its sheer size made him think of the River Trent back in Nottingham. Then they were in Saint Paul, and Dad switched from 52 to 35 E, which was an even bigger motorway. They sped along in the narrow valley created for the motorway, tall walls and embankments holding up the buildings alongside as the motorway snaked between them like a river. Then Dad took an exit ramp and got onto a city street, speeding through neighborhoods both rich and poor.

Finally, just before nine o'clock, they found the Fairgrounds; even at that early hour, the line of cars waiting to get in was nearly a block long. Fortunately, the ticket-takers were very efficient and Dad soon had the wagon parked inside one of the last available parking spaces in the enormous car park, itself nearly twice the size of the Nortons' farm. This was good, as it meant that they could avoid paying through the nose for the dubious privilege of parking on somebody's lawn; the front yards of the houses facing the Fairgrounds along Snelling Avenue were filling up with automobiles already.

Even with the gradually-urbanized preparation of the drive, Severus was still astonished at how big it was. It really was a city within a city. Huge elms and cottonwoods lined the streets of this city, and there were enough people on the streets and sidewalks to make it slow going in spots.

A man and a woman, both in their early thirties, were standing at the John Deere display on Machinery Hill, near the car park entrance; the man was holding a small boy by the hand, and the woman was pushing a stroller with an infant in it. It was obvious that they were waiting for somebody, and the rush of excitement Severus felt from Julie – a split second before he felt the squeeze of her slim hand in his – confirmed what he had suspected.

"_Mom! Dad!_" Julie let go of Severus' hand for the first time since they'd got into the car that morning, and shot like a rocket into the waiting arms of her father and mother, hugging them both simultaneously like an energetic octopus while a group of large two-story-tall green machines stood guard over them all. "It's good to _see_ you!"

"It's good to see you too, sweetie," laughed Julie's father, returning the hug as best he could before gently disengaging himself. "It's good to see all of you." He turned toward Severus, offering a hand and a smile. "I'm David Halvorson, Julie's dad. We've talked on the phone."

"Yes, yes, we have," said Severus, looking over Julie's dad as intently as Julie's dad was looking over him; the glint in each other's eyes told that they both approved of what they saw. "It's good to meet you in person, Mr. Halvorson."

David Halvorson had brown hair, but he also had his mother's eyes and his daughter's eyes, that same dark blue that shaded nearly to black. They crinkled in pleasure as he grinned. "Mom thinks you're the bee's knees, Severus. And," he continued, looking over at Hjordis – a mentally-alert, happily energetic Hjordis, pushing herself up from the wheelchair to receive a hug from the little boy at his father's side – "I'm beginning to see why. By the way, this is Jeannie," he said, tilting his head towards his wife.

"Hello, Severus," smiled Jeannie Halvorson. She didn't have Julie's eyes, obviously, but she did have Julie's heart-shaped face, lithe physique, and upturned nose. "And these little guys are Kevin –" she indicated with a look the small boy whose head just about came up to the back handlebars on Hjordis' wheelchair "– and Traci." She looked down at the little girl in the stroller, whose eyes had picked that moment to pop open; they regarded Severus steadily, in a manner unsettlingly reminiscent of both Hjordis and Julie, just before she broke into an earsplitting wail.

"Oh, dear," Severus said, jumping back from the stroller as if Traci had just spit acid on him, or he on her. "I– I didn't mean to–"

"You didn't do anything, Severus," David Halvorson said, patting him on the back. "That's just Traci letting us know she wants to be fed and held." He reached into the stroller and unstrapped the squalling child from it. His smile immediately turned to a frown, even as the baby's cries quickly settled into contented coos.

"Pee-you! I think I know another reason she was crying," he said, handing Traci off to his wife. She patted the baby's diaper and nodded.

"We're going to duck into the ladies' room for a moment, gang. If you'll excuse us –"

"Wait," Severus said.

They all turned to look at him. "Um.. Why, Sev?" Jeannie Halvorson asked.

"I think I can clean her up right here, but you'll all have to crowd around me for a second..."

They did so, and fifteen seconds later, a happy Traci, holding a bottle and wearing freshly-cleaned diapers, was settled back into her stroller.

"Hey, you could make a ton of money doing that here, Sev," David said as they walked along. "'Sev's Diaper Service'."

Two months ago, if someone had tried to call him 'Sev', much less make a joke about him and baby poo, Severus Snape would have been offended in the extreme. But that was two months ago. Severus John Prince Norton knew that Mr. Halvorson meant no harm by it – and really, it _was_ rather funny, the idea of opening up a magical nappie-cleaning service... though it did have its merits...

The Nortons and Halvorsons all walked together for the first few blocks. Julie wasn't exactly holding Severus' hand, but she might as well have been, considering how close she was to him. And while they all walked, they all discussed Severus, Julie, and Hjordis, and the wizarding and Muggle worlds, in a fairly free and open manner.

It was amazing, how much privacy a large crowd at the Fair could ensure. Severus was prepared to whisper a quick _Muffiliato_, but soon he found he needn't bother. People were too focused on other things – which at this hour of the morning, mainly involved finding the best place to have breakfast at the Fair, and to hope that the line to get in wasn't too long – to bother with eavesdropping on a fairly ordinary-looking family.

And really, they did look fairly ordinary by local standards. Severus had worried at first that his hair, which was longish by the standards of Bratsberg and Rushford, might call undue attention to their little group. But he soon saw that for the Twin Cities males his age, his hair was if anything a touch short – there were several boys not much older than him who wore it halfway down their backs, often in braids that made them look like their long-dead Viking ancestors; in fact, boys just a little older than that, young men in their twenties, were wearing long beards as well, thus enhancing the Viking resemblance. As for clothing, his jeans and polo shirt were positively boring compared to the leather jackets, some of them fringed, that the long-haired sorts seemed to favor.

They wound up having pancakes at a small diner near a thing called the Sky Ride, which involved being shut up in a small metal-and-glass capsule and shunted from one end of the Fairgrounds to the other on two distressingly thin metal cables.

The Halvorsons were big fans of the Sky Ride. "You should try it, Sev," urged Mr. Halvorson, tucking into a mound of flapjacks nearly swimming in butter and maple syrup.

"Erm, I'd rather not, thanks," Severus replied. The mere thought of going up in that device made his stomach churn ominously. He wanted his pancakes to stay where he'd just put them, thank you very much.

"Bucccck buck buck buck," said Becky, gleefully making a noise she apparently thought sounded like a clucking hen. "Stink's a big _chicken_."

"It's fun, Severus," said Julie, secretly slipping her hand into his under the table where they sat. "I'll go with you." _And we can be all alone up there for a few minutes..._

_We will? Be all alone, that is?_

She smiled. _Yes. And we'll be clear on the other side of the Fairgrounds. It'll take them a while to catch up to us._

"Oh, well," he said airily and out loud, "I suppose there's a first time for everything..."

Towards the end of the trip, Severus had decided that the one thing wrong with the Sky Ride was that it was too short. Not just because of the views of the Fairgrounds – which really were quite impressive, though if he were more capable on a broom he could have bested them – but because after all the kissing and squeezing he and Julie had done, he was going to have to think some very pure thoughts indeed, and very quickly, before he dared venture out of the little blue capsule. Luckily, as Julie had predicted, the rest of their party hadn't caught up with them just yet.

They found themselves with a little time to kill, so they wandered the nearby collection of covered stalls called the Mexican Village, which seemed to be mostly a place for people to sell cheap tatty plastic "Spanish" dolls made in Taiwan. But there was one dolly there which, though plastic, was rather remarkable in its ornateness and prettiness. The dolly stood a foot and a half tall on its metal-wire stand; her (not its, but 'her', that's how real it seemed) red silk gown shimmered in the bright August sunlight, and the doll's skin was somewhat eerily lifelike. Her black synthetic hair was piled in a tight twist atop her head, the twist held in place by an ornate faux-ivory comb.

Julie stared at it longingly for more than a minute, before turning away from the display; she didn't have the money for it, and she felt more than a little ashamed for wanting a silly old child's dolly at the advanced age of fourteen and a quarter. She tried to suppress her disappointment from being felt by Severus, but it was simply too strong.

Severus reached into his pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill. He'd not only been saving his allowance money, but he and Julie had managed to earn a little additional money in Rushford delivering flyers, weekly papers, and handbills by bicycle.

"Excuse me, Miss?" he said, pointing to the dolly. "May I have that one, please?"

The woman at the stall looked at him, then looked at Julie. Then she smiled.

"Want a bag to put her in so she stays nice?"

"Yes, Miss. Please."

Julie didn't say anything as they walked away from the booth, the bag with the dolly in one of her hands. At least, not out loud. She didn't need to. The smile on her face, and in her mind, spoke volumes.


	21. Chapter 21

**Chapter Twenty-One**

It was the shouting that woke Severus up.

He rolled to one side, half-wondering if he was still asleep and having a dream, when the door to his bedroom flew open so hard, the doorknob dented the plaster under the wallpaper when it hit the wall.

And there, after nearly two months, was his Aunt Lobelia, dressed in her customary black, looking as angry as he'd ever seen her.

Another witch and a wizard were right behind her, red-faced and angry themselves, though trying their best to compose themselves in front of the boy wizard. All three of them had their wands clutched tightly in their hands.

Severus felt the blood in his veins turn to ice. Whatever Aunt Lobelia had in mind, it couldn't be good.

"So," she said, in that viciously grating voice of hers that she reserved for when she was most displeased with him, "_this_ is what you've been up to, you miserable cur!"

"Miss Prince!" cried out the witch next to her, in obvious horror. "This is uncalled for!"

"You'll be lucky not to land a stretch in Azkaban for what you've just done downstairs," chimed in the male wizard, shaking his long head in mixed disgust and disbelief. "Stunning the boy's Muggle benefactors like that."

_Bloody hell_, Severus thought, as his insides turned to water. _She dared to attack Dad and Mom and Becky..._

"And was I supposed to just let that little mare, that – that _girl_ – bite into me?" snapped back Aunt Lobelia, waving around her left arm; the sleeve of her dress was indeed torn at that point, revealing a bony forearm. There was a set of child's teeth marks around the one fleshy spot of that part of her arm.

_Well done, Brat_, Severus found himself thinking, even as he tried to move for his wand without being seen doing so. If only Aunt Lobelia and the others would stay distracted by arguing amongst themselves, he could perhaps Apparate away from here and get help...

"Perhaps she wouldn't have bitten you if you weren't doing your best to be unpleasant to her and her family," the red-haired witch said in that sort of low, tightly controlled voice one adopts right before throwing the grandest of wobblies.

"Are you sure you want to go through with this?" the wizard said, cutting off Lobelia's retort to the red-haired witch. "He seems to be doing well enough right where he is," he said, indicating Severus' bedroom – and by implication, the Stunned family downstairs – with a wave of his hand. "And you really weren't interested before –"

"I am _now!_" hissed Lobelia, stamping a black-leather-shod foot on the floor. She shot Severus a venomous look. "No offspring of my sister's is going to live as a cursed Muggle! Not when I have the power to prevent it!" She turned towards the wizard, a cruel smile on her face. "You know what to do, man," she said, in a voice of creaky menace.

The wizard looked at her aghast. "You cannot mean it!"

Severus suddenly knew what was coming next. He could feel his life with the Nortons, with Julie, all his chances at happiness, slipping away like mist through his fingers.

Lobelia's smile grew even crueler as it grew wider. "I can, and I do." She paused a moment before sinking her next barb into the wizard's flesh. "It's your duty as a Ministry employee to fulfill my wishes as his next of kin."

"But to do that –"

"I don't want_ any _Muggle taint on him, Rostand, d'ye hear me? NONE!"

The wizard she had called "Rostand" turned a sad face towards the boy in the bed. "I'm sorry about this, lad," he said, as he pointed his wand at the boy. "_Obliviate!_"

And suddenly for Severus, the world went fuzzy.

------------

Another bed, twenty-two years later:

The Potions master felt himself in free fall yet again, his spirit plummeting toward some unspecified doom even as his body remained secure in his bed, in his chambers.

_Severus John Prince Norton... Severus Snape? _

_Who am I? Who should I be?_

_Who _can _I be?_

_Help me, somebody... please..._

He really wasn't expecting that last to be answered, as he fell helplessly to his doom, but it was.

The – _something_, that same recurring something that kept coming in to save him, saved him yet again, surrounding him in a soft pink haze that felt like a feather bed. The something that was a someone, but whose name he couldn't quite place at the moment.

_I won't let you fall, Severus..._

The next thing he noticed was that he wasn't falling anymore, but standing on what passed for solid ground in his dream-world. A man was standing in front of him.

"I can't tell you how good it is to see you again, son," the man said, extending a work-worn, sunburned hand to him.

Severus then knew that the man was his Dad, and the pink mist was Julie.

He wanted to run to his Dad, to hug him and never let go. But the memory of the last twenty years intervened, and stood between them like a brick wall.

"Please, go away, sir," Severus said, turning away from John Norton's outstretched hand. "I have no right to be your son. Do you know the things I've done in my life?"

"Albus told me all about them, son."

Dream-Severus turned around to face the man. "He has? Dumbledore?"

"Yes, he has, son. He's a good man, your boss."

Severus looked down at John Norton's seamed, smiling face. It had acquired a few extra wrinkles in the last two decades. "And... and you still..." His dream-self paused, not quite able to say the words without breaking down.

"I always have, son. And always will."

_It was a lovely dream_, Severus thought as he felt himself suspended halfway between sleep and wakefulness. _But of course Dad's not here. Or Julie. The things I've done, the life I've led – they could never forgive that..._

"You're not real, Dad," he said, as he felt himself being gathered up against the buttons of Dad's shirtfront. It was such a perfect illusion; he could even feel the round can of Copenhagen Dad kept in his shirt pocket. "Merlin knows I wish you were. But you're not..."

"You bet your sweet bippy I'm real, son," said the voice of his Dad. My, how efficient Severus' subconscious was, to create such a good illusion; it had thrown in a slight quaver into his memory of John Norton's voice, to add in the twenty-odd years of aging to make up the difference between 1974 and 1996.

"Dad, how can you be real? How can you be real and still forgive me?"

"Forgive you for what, son?"

"For – for being a Death Eater. For being everything you would never have wanted me to be."

The nonexistent strong arms around him gave him a big squeeze. "But you're not now, son. That's the important thing." Another squeeze of those illusory arms. "If you were really as bad as you think you are, you wouldn't be sorry over what you've done."

"You make it sound so easy," Severus said bitterly, feeling more than uncommonly foolish for arguing with an illusion. "You make it sound as if I'd done nothing worse than break a window. How can you do this? How can you trust me?"

"Because, son. Just because. I don't need a reason to trust my own son."

"But I'm _not_ your son, Dad!" Severus cried out, his anguish contorting his features as they tried to burrow into the comfort of the nonexistent flannel shirt. "I don't _deserve_ to be your son."

"'Course you do, Severus. 'Course you do."

"Dad..."

The arms about him felt so strong, so real. And Severus could even smell the Copenhagen in the can, the moist aroma of fresh chewing tobacco filling his nostrils, so close they were to where the can sat in Dad's shirt pocket. Severus could even feel himself being propped up in his own bed, in his own bedchamber at Hogwarts.

At Hogwarts...

Severus tensed, and ran a hand tentatively along the sleeve of one of the illusory arms. His fingers felt flannel cloth, and hard muscle and bone underneath.

He had the sensation of swimming upward, of breaking the hazy, shimmering surface of his dreams and entering into a new, harshly-lit but extremely clear reality.

The Potions master was fully awake now, though his eyes were still closed and his face still pressed against what he still feared was the illusory flannel shirt of his illusory Dad. In a mixture of hope and trepidation, he slowly pulled his face away from the shirt, opening his eyes at the same time.

And, as he looked up, he saw looking down at him, in the flesh – the real, undeniable, living flesh – the smiling, weatherbeaten face of John Bennett Norton, his Dad.


	22. Chapter 22

**Chapter Twenty-Two**

"Take it easy, son," said John Norton, as Severus tried to sit up and look around the room. "You've been out for nearly two weeks."

"Two... weeks?"

"Yupper, two weeks." Severus was now a good deal taller than his Dad, yet Dad's strong arms were holding him up just as they did in the bean field over twenty years earlier. And Severus felt as weak as a kitten, just as he had in the bean field over twenty years earlier.

"Have you been here that long, Dad?"

Dad shook his head, dislodging some of the carefully-combed strands of what was now nearly totally gray hair. "Nope, just about a week. Albus and Minerva and Molly came to bring us over at first, though now they've got our fireplace hooked up to the Floo Network, so we don't need to impose on them all the time."

"You're on the Floo now?"

John Norton's face split in his trademark grin; it was surrounded by a few extra facial creases since Severus had seen it last. "Uh-huh, though it's kept on the Q.T. – the only Ministry personnel who know about it are Tonks and Shacklebolt. Not even old Scrimgeour knows about it – he just knows that Dumbledore wanted something done, and that Albus, and not him, was going to decide who knew what about it."

"Who at the Ministry did Dumbledore bribe to achieve that? Or did he just catch Scrimgeour in a compromising position?"

Severus' Dad laughed. In fact, he guffawed. He guffawed so hard tears came to his eyes. "You don't want to see the images in my head from that, son," he said, when he finally got himself under control. "Actually, I don't know what he did, exactly, but I think it involved reminding the paper-pushers at the Ministry just how badly they messed things up last year with the Umbridge business."

"Ah, they told you about that?" Severus said. "Now that was a year of infamy, that."

"So they tell me."

"Who's teaching my Dark Arts classes?" Severus said, wincing as he moved muscles that hadn't been moved in many days.

"A nice fella named Remus Lupin, for the most part – though he's technically only there as an 'assistant'."

"'Assistant'? I'm not exactly fond of Lupin, but he's perfectly capable of following my lesson plan." Severus' eyes narrowed. "Unless..."

"Unless what, son?"

Severus pursed his lower lip slightly. "Did you know that Lupin is a werewolf?"

"Yes, actually. He mentioned it to me first thing."

"Then you know about the regard – or rather, the near-complete lack thereof – in which werewolves are generally held?"

"Yupper."

"Then that would explain why he's not officially allowed to teach here."

"That's exactly it," replied John Norton, rolling his eyes. "Dumbledore has pull, but not enough to get Remus made a full instructor, not with him being a known werewolf. That old glad-hander Slughorn is officially running the class. I shouldn't criticize him, he seems to know his stuff – he was your Head of House when you were a student here, wasn't he?"

"Yes, he was," replied the Potions master. "And yes, he does know his stuff, and yes, I can understand your distaste for him." He made a harsh chuckle. "Has he invited you to one of his parties?"

"Oh, yeah. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Though he was really interested in Hjordis and Julie – Sarah and Becky and I were just the hangers-on as far as he was concerned."

Severus' eyes went wide. "They're here?" he said. "Hjordis and Julie?"

Even as he said the words, he could feel the sudden presence of two mental signatures. Two very familiar mental signatures.

_Who do you think helped put you back together again, silly?_ said the younger of the two, as clear as if she'd spoken it out loud.

He turned towards the door leading to his offices. And there they were, standing side by side in the doorway.

Hjordis' hair was now almost all white; she was a bit thinner, though still quite substantial; the skin hung somewhat loosely on her arms. She'd got newer glasses, and she was leaning rather heavily on a strange four-pronged cane. But the blue eyes behind those glasses were as sharp as ever; she had obviously been getting enough supplies to continue making the memory-sharpening potion. _Hello there, dear_, she said with her mind, in order to prove the point.

And then, then there was Julie.

She hadn't grown much taller, if at all, in the past twenty years. Nor had she put on much in the way of weight, except to get just a bit curvier in all the places she should have curves; Severus guessed he still could pick her up with one arm, as he'd been wont to do when he would get her alone somewhere in the tree-shaded bluffs when they stopped to rest their lungs after taking their bikes up one of the long climbs out of Rushford. The hair had a few blonde streaks in it, artificial no doubt, but was still the same length it was when he knew her.

And the eyes, the dark-blue eyes she shared with her grandmother... the eyes were still very much large and alive and sparkling, as much if not more than they ever had been.

_Severus_, she mind-whispered, and he felt the rush of emotion, of passion, and of love above all, coming from her like an express train, colliding into him and filling him up as if he were a dry sponge. And before he could stop himself, before he could tell himself that this was a virtual stranger he hadn't seen in over twenty years and didn't remember for over twenty years, he felt himself responding in kind.

_Julie..._

A thought came to him. _It was you, you and your gran, holding me up, wasn't it?_

_Yes, Severus, it was. _She gave him a small smile. _Your mental defenses were down, and ours are pretty damned strong, so Gran ran interference for you while I got to work putting you back together again..._

'_Ran interference'?... _Severus' blood ran cold suddenly. _You mean she wrestled with the Dark Lord! Julie, you've no idea of the danger –_

_Oh, yes we do, _she said firmly, the smile on her face taking on a grim, ironic cast. _We had to violate your privacy pretty thoroughly in order to get you your mind back, love. _The smile faltered. _For which we're both very sorry..._

_Privacy be damned! I'm worried about the Dark Lord _hurting_ you!_

Julie actually laughed out loud. _He doesn't know about me, only about Gran – and only as the mysterious entity that won't let him anywhere near your mind, even through the link of the Dark Mark. He thinks that Dumbledore's come up with a new spell or something. _She smirked. _We've had thirty-plus years to practice what your people call 'Legilimency' and 'Occlumency', Severus. We're pretty damned good at it. You can put us to the test if you want._

Severus made a face._ I think I just might, at that... but not right now. I'm famished._

_Then let's have supper. _"Want a bite to eat?" Julie said out loud. "What do you feel capable of keeping down?"

----------------------

Over breadsticks and bowls of chicken soup, with Julie, the Nortons (Sarah having been summoned via the Floo) and Hjordis sitting on chairs arranged around the Potions master's bed, Severus was apprised of what had gone on in the eleven days of his coma. He was also apprised, to a degree, of what had been going on with the Nortons and Halvorsons in the twenty-two years since he was taken from them.

Dad and Mom still had the farm, though they weren't raising soybeans any more, aside from a few bushels' worth for the local Japanese restaurant in Rochester. They'd turned the bean field over to growing organic provender for local restaurants, mostly in Rochester, which thanks to the Mayo Clinic and its high proportion of jet-set clients was able to support a good number of upscale dining establishments. It was working out for them pretty well, so far, and they still had the berries and cows for dairy products – though Ava and Marilyn had long since gone to that great cow pasture in the sky. And during the fall and winter, they made extra money using the house as a bed-and-breakfast stop for persons hiking, biking or skiing the local trails.

Julie, as it turned out, did not become a professional actress, though she used techniques from the theater in her work. "I'm a modified-Jungian psychotherapist," she said, as she sat on a chair next to Severus' bed. She sipped her soup from a mug which she had carefully accepted from a house-elf; she had obviously not been here quite long enough to get used to the little beings.

"'Psychotherapist'?"

"Psychiatrist, to be exact. Which means I can prescribe drugs just like a regular doctor in addition to performing non-drug-related psychotherapy. Most of my non-drug therapy involves what's known in the Muggle world as 'guided dream imagery'." She smiled at him over her mug. "As you can imagine, I have a rather unusual treatment protocol, the exact mechanics of which I can't divulge to my colleagues for fear of getting laughed out of the profession."

"Indeed."

"But of course that can't be mentioned publicly even in the wizarding world, or your ex-boss, Old Heartbreak of Psoriasis, would put two and two together. So we had to cobble up another excuse for us all being here."

"And what did you create?"

Julie grinned. "The Official Story is that Horace heard about Gran and me being bloodstoppers – he's keeping our mentalist tricks hush-hush, for obvious reasons – and thought we might be handy over at St. Mungo's, though not without a trial period – and a chance for Sluggo to put us on display – here at Hogwarts."

"Ah," Severus said, between swallows of soup. "You finally became a bloodstopper, eh?"

"Yeah. It was right after you left. Effie came over to check on you and me and when she found out you'd been taken, she cut open her hand slamming her fist down on Sarah's dining room table; she didn't realize there was a steak knife there."

Severus winced at the thought. "That must not have been pretty."

"It wasn't. But it was really odd. I was going to call for Gran, but for some reason I didn't. I didn't even think about it, I just grabbed her hand and thought really hard, willing the bleeding to stop. And it did."

"Have you been able to do anything else? Magically, I mean?"

"Nope," she said, shaking her head; the torchlight over his bed sought out certain portions of her hair, turning it a warm red-tinged chestnut color."Effie checked me every six months, but nothing happened. Finally, the Department of Magic officially took me and Gran off her caseload, but she still would come by to visit, up until about three years after you left. Haven't heard from her in dog years, but right up until the last time we saw her, she was still trying to get the M.O.M. to hand you back."

They finished off the rest of their supper; Severus summoned a house-elf to clear away the dishes. The Potions and Dark Arts master lay back against his pillows, his eyes closed a moment, resting after all the excitement. But he was most definitely not sleeping.

"There's a war on, you know," he said, eyes popping open to take him their reactions.

"Yes, Severus, we know," Mom said. She pushed a lock of her hair, now salt-and-pepper, behind her ear.

"And we know what sort of part you're playing in it," added her husband. "And we know about the need for secrecy. We won't do anything to jeopardize what you're doing."

Severus opened his mouth, but Hjordis forestalled him. "Don't worry, Severus. John's and Sarah's minds are safe – Julie and I made sure of that."

Severus looked at her quizzically for a moment. "You put up _Mind Barriers _on them?"

"Yes, we did," replied Hjordis proudly.

"Not only that," chimed in Julie, "but we camouflaged them with various boring false and half-true memories, so that there's no telltale mentalist version of the Great Wall of China to draw attention to the very things we're trying to hide."

Severus stared at Julie. "That – that's something only the very best Occlumenses can achieve."

Julie and Hjordis smiled identical smiles. "That would be us, dear," Hjordis said, the sweet tone overlaid on her gravelly voice. "And Dumbledore himself's been unable to get past the camouflage we've put up. If he can't do it, then Old Scale Face certainly can't." She looked at Severus, and her smug expression softened. "But you're all tuckered out. Bet you'd like to take a nap after all this excitement."

"Erm, yes, I would, actually," Severus replied. He had been getting drowsy; the food was lulling him to sleep.

"Then we'll leave you for a little bit and come back later with Albus and Minerva and Poppy." She stood up, and the rest of Severus' visitors followed suit. "But don't worry, we'll be with you in spirit. Literally."

Severus smiled, then closed his eyes a second time. As he drifted off into a normal sleep, he could feel Julie nearby, mentally whispering something to him:

_We missed you so much, Severus... we're so glad to have you back..._

And on that comforting thought, he fell asleep.


	23. Chapter 23

**Chapter Twenty-Three**

The headmaster of Hogwarts and the Dark Arts and Potions master of that fine school sat in a pair of overstuffed chairs, staring bemusedly at the elderly woman sitting placidly across from them.

Dumbledore and Severus had just finished an hour and a half of trying to get past the mental defenses of Hjordis Halvorson, and both of them had little more to show for it than the beginnings of monstrous headaches.

It wasn't just that she was the psionic equivalent of a brick wall. It was that you never realized you were up against a brick wall in the first place. She would lure you down various plausible-but-fake mental pathways and blind alleys, pathways whose fakeness you would never have suspected unless she wanted you to suspect them, and you never could be quite sure whether what you were seeing was truth, invention, or some deceptive mixture of the two. Rarely did she need to face a head-on attack, because she was so good at throwing down supple and detailed distractions; yet she could and did take the occasional hammer-blows from both men's minds with ridiculous ease, and in the process made those two expert Legilimenses look like amateurs.

"I trust, then, that your concerns are somewhat alleviated, Severus?" a wincing Dumbledore said as he measured out a pair of doses of headache remedy from the silver flask he kept in his desk, a necessity in his duties as headmaster.

Severus nodded dully as he accepted a dram glass from Dumbledore. "Yes, yes they are," he replied, just before tipping back the medicine and swallowing it in one gulp. "If we can't defeat her, working in tandem, then not even the Dark Lord could do it – and he would never deign to allow another Legilimens to assist him."

"Ah. He'd be too worried, and with good reason, about being attacked by his assistant."

Severus grunted his assent.

"Are you sure you don't want any headache remedy, Hjordis?" Dumbledore asked, once he had swallowed his own dose. "You performed some tremendously taxing exertions with your mind."

Mrs. Halvorson smiled. "Thank you, no, Albus. I feel just fine."

"'Fine'," Severus echoed unbelievingly. "She's just been subjected to the worst that the two best Legilimenses alive can throw at a person, and she feels 'fine'."

"Well, I am, dear," smiled Hjordis. "That was a mite complex, having the two of you to fend off, but Julie and I have practiced far more intensely on each other over the years."

Severus shook his head. "And yet neither of you can cast a spell."

"So much the better for us, Severus," rejoined Dumbledore, as his mottled and blackened hand, injured earlier that year, set down his now-empty dram glass on the desk. "This will cause them both to be underestimated."

"Exactly," nodded Hjordis. "There's a tendency I've seen among the wizarding world, particularly among those on the other side, to assume that to be a Muggle is to be stupid. That's something that will work in our favor." She looked at her wristwatch. "Two forty-five. I've gotta get a move on – I promised Horace I'd let him try some more of his anti-gout solution on me."

Severus and Albus each raised an eyebrow. "You're letting him experiment on you?" asked the Potions and Dark Arts master.

"It's not that bad," Hjordis replied, chuckling. "Poor Horace would never give it to me if he thought there was the slightest risk in it. If anything, he's a touch on the overprotective side where I'm concerned, the big lug." She pushed herself out of the chair and reached for her four-pronged cane. "And it does seem to be working. Don't know if I'll be going jogging anytime soon, but at least now I can use the cane instead of the walker. Good afternoon, gentlemen."

"Good afternoon, Hjordis," Dumbledore and Severus replied in chorus, as she hobbled briskly out the door.

-----------------------------------

For a man – or rather, a being – whose fortunes were thought to be in the ascendant, Lord Voldemort was strangely unsettled. His moods varied greatly, and often, and usually without the slightest hint of a warning to those unfortunate enough to be near him at the time. There were two factors weighing on his mind, pulling him this way and that with equal forcefulness.

On the one hand, the battle was now officially joined; Lucius' ridiculous gamble at the Ministry earlier that summer had forced the Dark Lord to show himself openly before he was quite ready to do so; as a result, there were many casualties among his minions and allies, with Dumbledore's forces – most of whom were schoolchildren! – coming off rather lightly.

On the other hand, Dumbledore's own powers, which had been at their peak for far longer than anyone had thought possible, were finally on the wane. He had managed a few months ago to injure himself in what Severus Snape, the Dark Lord's most trusted and useful lieutenant now that Lucius Malfoy was in disfavor, contemptuously described as a "pre-senile magical accident". The appearance of Dumbledore in public, rheumy-eyed, limping slightly and with an obviously magically-withered hand, bore witness to the truth of Severus' description.

Voldemort feared a healthy Dumbledore more than he feared the whole of the Ministry, more even than Harry Potter himself – and Potter, from all accounts but especially Severus', was a rather incurious, clumsy, lazy boy interested mainly in Quidditch who leaned on his friends to do his thinking for him. Hardly a match for the entity that even Dumbledore admitted was, when mortal, the most brilliant student ever to pass through Hogwarts' doors.

But a sickened, possibly pre-senescent Dumbledore – that was another matter entirely.

Granted, Dumbledore still was quite potent. When the Dark Lord had discovered that Severus had suffered a temporarily incapacitating incident himself, thanks to the clumsiness and inattentiveness of Harry Potter, he found that he was prevented from trying to pry into Severus' helpless mind by a bit of protection magic that had Dumbledore's name written all over it. No one but him could have designed a spell so maddeningly effective.

But be that as it may, Dumbledore was still weakening and wounded, and would get weaker still with time. The Dark Lord was looking forward to the day when Albus Dumbledore no longer stood between him and his dreams of conquest.

------------------------

"That's the last of them, then," said Trainee Healer Augustus Pye to Julie and her grandmother as they wrapped up their tour of the Janus Thickey ward of the Spell Damage floor at St. Mungo's one fine November morning, some six weeks after the two women had first come to Hogwarts. This was Julie's third visit, and she and Hjordis had already made quite the impression on the staff. "I must say that I've never seen a talent such as yours," continued Healer Pye, "yours and your grandmother's, that is. Most bloodstoppers can't heal magically-caused injuries."

"Just lucky, I guess," smiled Doctor Halvorson, smoothing out the wrinkles in the robes she'd been given to wear. St. Mungo's staff robes, they were, and her gran was wearing them too: Lime green, with an emblem consisting of a wand crossed over a bone; in Julie's and Hjordis' case, they had an extra element, a small red B – for Bloodstopper – below the St. Mungo's emblem.

Hjordis, now walking unassisted for the first time in decades thanks to Horace Slughorn, matched her granddaughter smile for smile. "It just comes naturally," she said as they walked briskly alone. "I'm half afraid that if we stay here too long you'll vivisect us just to find out what makes us tick."

Pye's boyish face turned dead white. "Oh, Merlin's beard, no!" he said. "Never in life!" Pye might advocate the use of some Muggle methods, but the mere thought of cutting into living, conscious, unanesthetized beings rightly horrified him, as both Hjordis and Julie knew it would. Thus, it served as a useful distraction from his probing further into their shared capabilities.

"I was wondering," Julie said, taking advantage of his horrified silence to change the subject as they walked the ward, "whether some of my Muggle world's medicines could be put to good use on some of the patients with mental illnesses."

Pye turned to look at her. "I've been wondering the same thing, Doctor," he said. "The Longbottoms, right?"

"Right."

"You're thinking about using that new generation of antipsychotic medicines, then?"

"I sure am." Julie had secretly done quick scans of both Frank and Alice Longbottom, probing their minds with hers; they were classic cases of trauma-induced psychosis. The new, "atypical" antipsychotics were tailor-made for situations like theirs.

"I've never been able to procure any."

"Well, I can," Julie said. "It's part of my job." She raised her eyes to the ceiling as she walked in thought. "Clozapine's the most commonly-used drug, but that tends to suppress white blood cell count and thus immune system function; however, there's a new drug called olanzapine that doesn't produce that side effect." She thought some more, her pert, upturned nose crinkling as she did. "I could certainly bring some here from the States."

Pye's earnest young face lit up. "You could? That'd be awfully good of you."

"I'll bring over some antianxiety drugs, too. It often works best if those are administered first." She looked at him. "Won't we have to clear it with Healer Smethwyck or Strout first, though?"

Pye gave her a sad smile. "No. The Longbottoms were written off as incurable over a decade ago. It's why Smethwyck trusts me, a trainee, with them, even though this isn't my ward – he doesn't think I can harm them more than they've been harmed already."

"I'll be the judge of that," said Julie, fully Doctor Halvorson now with all that this entailed. "I was able to help their son, Neville, with his memory problems."

This pulled Augustus Pye up short. "Did you now?" he said. "What happened?"

Dr. Halvorson's voice was dark and bleak. "Professor Dumbledore, when he found out I was a psychiatrist, had Neville Longbottom come to me for therapy for some memory problems he'd been having." She took a deep breath. "It turned out that the memory problems stemmed from an Obliviate he'd been given as a toddler."

Healer Pye was aghast. "Why would anyone Obliviate a toddler?"

"Neville was in the room when the Death Eaters were torturing his parents. He saw the whole thing. Some well-meaning Auror tried to wipe the event from his mind, but wound up impairing his short-term memory in the process."

"Merlin's beard... that poor boy..."

Julie took another deep breath. She remembered all too well witnessing those memories with Neville in his own mind, and the agony they had caused him; agony that was no less sharp for having been repressed all these years. It was one of the few times in her career when she had wondered, if only for a moment, whether it would have been better to have left a problem untreated. But Neville had rallied, when he realized that he wasn't alone to relive those awful memories: Julie and Hjordis would be with him every step of the way.

"So you were able to help him?" Pye asked, after a longish silence.

"Yes, yes I was. It took a while, and a lot of therapy and the occasional Dreamless Sleep potion –" _and a lot more things that I can't tell you about_, she thought to herself, _not until after what's left of Voldemort is ground into a fine dust and burned in the fireplace in Dumbledore's office_ "– but I was able to help him._" _She turned to smile at Pye. It was a more subdued version of her earlier smile, but it was a smile nonetheless. "If I can help Neville, I can help his parents. Trust me."

---------------------------

A small, dainty grey tabby cat, having finished grading the last set of Transfiguration essays, was just settling down to sunning herself in the window of her office when she heard the slap-slap-slap of shoe leather on stone just outside her open office door. _That sounds like Severus' shoes_, she thought.

With the cat equivalent of a sigh, she transformed herself. She was back at her desk, and in human form, just as Professor Snape burst into her office. 

"Minerva," he said, "may I borrow your Time-Turner?"

She fetched it from where she kept it and handed it over to him with a raised eyebrow. "Dare I ask why?"

Severus hesitated a moment before responding. "I'm going to St. Mungo's for a little while."

If Minerva McGonagall were capable of smirking, she may well have done so at that moment. Instead, she kept her face free of even the slightest hint of a smirk. "Very well. Return it to me in one piece, Severus."

"That, I promise you. Thank you, Minerva." He turned to go, his black robes sweeping behind him.

--------------------

"I do hope we're not keeping you from your practice or your home life, Doctor," Augustus Pye said as they walked the Dai Llewellyn ward. "You've been spending a lot of time here."

Dr. Halvorson gave a small laugh. "Oh, my practice is doing just fine, Augustus. I'm always 'on call'," she said, patting the small pager where it sat under her robes, "and with the Floo I can be back home in an instant. Besides, I don't really have a life outside of my work anyway -- if I wasn't here I'd just be sitting in front of the TV watching some stupid sitcom or something."

Pye didn't know what 'sitcoms' were and wasn't about to embarrass himself by asking. "'Married to your work', I take it?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "Pretty much so. Never had time for a husband, much less a family." The truth was a bit more complicated, but it wasn't something she could blurt out to Augustus.

Their conversation was interrupted by the appearance of a visitor, who had checked his fast stride down the hell to make way for them as he walked in the other direction. His face had the slightest suggestion of hauteur about it as his gaze went from the Trainee Healer to the Muggle doctor. But there was something under that hauteur that Pye could not detect.

_Perfect timing, love -- my shift's just ending._

Meet me in the supply cupboard in five minutes, Julie?  
I'll be there with bells on, Severus.

Please don't. Wear bells, that is. Wouldn't want to attract attention. 

_Speaking of which, we'll have to stay quiet in the cupboard – can't use any type of silencing or muffling spells. The wards are set to detect it when unauthorized people cast them..._

"Good afternoon, Professor," Pye said.

"Good afternoon, Healer Pye, Dr. Halvorson. If you will excuse me..." And he was gone down the hallway without another word.

"Such a ray of sunshine, he is," Julie said once he was out of sight. "Has he always been so antisocial?"  
_  
I heard that, Julie!_

I know you did, love. You can spank me for it later.

Is that a promise?

Pye grinned. "Actually, that was positively polite by his standards. He used to just whip past without so much as a grunt."

_I heard that, too._

I know you did, Severus. Relax and I'll be along in a minute.

"Ah. Well, I'd better be going, myself, Augustus. I have to go freshen up first, though."

_The Call of the Bladder?_

Of course. Now stop it, Severus, or I'll spank **you**.

Spoilsport.

"Well, then, same time this weekend?"

"Certainly, Augustus. Catch you later."

They parted as they came to the lavatories at the end of the hall.

When Julie was finished with her ablutions, she made her way to the large walk-in supply cupboard just across the hall and shut the door behind her. She stood in the middle of the floor, surrounded by shelves stacked with all sorts of arcane instruments and implements, and looked patiently at the one clear spot on the floor directly in front of her.

_I spy with my Inner Eye... a Dark Arts master!_

The air shimmered in a silvery way, and the one clear spot was revealed to be occupied after all.

_Full marks to Gryffindor, Miss Halvorson._

Julie looked up at Severus, returning his smile as he took her in his arms. _So you think I would have Sorted there?_

Almost certainly. You're too disgustingly noble for your own good.

She repressed a soft chuckle. _You say the sweetest things, love. _His response was to pull her closer and kiss her forehead. Her arms automatically slid around him, enveloping him the way her mind offered to envelop his.

With great reluctance, Severus disengaged himself, physically and mentally, just long enough to pull an object from inside of his robes. _Here it is._

_That's a Time-Turner?_

That's a Time-Turner.

Not exactly a precision instrument, is it?

You'd be surprised, love. 

He turned it two times, then set it in a safe spot on the nearest bit of shelving. _Two hours. That will have to do for us for now._

Julie's eyes sparkled._ I'm sure we'll make the most of it._

She put her head against his shoulder, and for a moment they said nothing, with either mouths or minds, content just to feel each other's warmth and closeness. It had been so long, so very long...

_I remember the day they took you, Severus. I remember it... more than anything. _ She snuggled tighter against his robes. _I was asleep, just like you were. _

_What woke you up?_

_Your despair._

She pulled her face away from his shoulder so she could look him in the eye; her hands clutched hold of his robes. _We could feel it, Gran and I. We could feel your agony, your helplessness, your despair... and before we could get over there, you were gone._

_Oh, Julie..._

His hands pulled her closer as they ran over her from back to buttocks, soothing and caressing. _You couldn't have stopped them, you know._

Tears from her eyes settled onto the skin of his neck_. I could have tried. I could have done **something.** At least Becky took a chomp out of that old bitch._

Severus couldn't help but snicker at that vision, even as he raised up Julie's chin so he could kiss her tears away. _It's just as well that you didn't try. _

_It's why I decided to become a shrink._

_A shrink?_

She gave him a small smile. _Short for "head-shrinker". It's a colloquial term for 'psychiatrist'. _The smile faded_. It was my way of trying to make up for not being able to save you..._

_But you **did **save me after all, Julie. _

Severus hugged her tighter to him. _You did save me, in the end. _He grimaced slightly. _I feel horrible for thinking this... but I'm so glad you weren't attached, when Dumbledore came to fetch you for me._

Now it was Julie's turn to snicker. _Why should I be attached? Besides to you? Not that I didn't try, early on... but it wasn't the same. It just wasn't the same. _Her gaze met his, steadfast and unwavering_. I couldn't connect the way I could with you. And can with you. _

_At least you were able to try. The way my life went, there was little time for me to try to find a lover, and less chance of finding someone who I suited – or whose ethical stance didn't repel me. _He made another grimace. _You're getting a virgin, I hope you know. Totally untrained and untried. Never so much as been kissed, aside from by you – and I didn't even know about that until a few weeks ago._

Julie smiled up at him as she ran her fingers lightly along his side; he drew in a sharp intake of breath and held it until her fingers moved away. _Then we can learn together._

She pulled his face to hers, and then they didn't do much mind-talking after that.


	24. Chapter 24

**Chapter Twenty-Four**

"So Dumbledore is finally getting old, eh, Severus?" asked the chubby young Trainee Healer Marcus Kennedy, once he decided that he and Professor Snape were out of earshot in a secluded part of the Janus Thickey ward one chilly day in January of 1998.

"So it would seem. The clumsiness that caused the accident that marred his hand, the tremors he exhibits in public on occasion... yes, he's most definitely past his best."

"The palsy of the aged... good, good," whispered Kennedy, who was also a newly-made Death Eater. "Our master will be glad to hear of it."

Severus placed a hand on Kennedy's arm; someone was coming. Kennedy took the hint, and the conversation switched to a different topic.

The persons coming down the corridor wore St. Mungo's robes, but were not actually part of the staff; the red "B"s on their robes showed that. They wore the robes mainly because they wanted to reassure the witches and wizards they treated of their right to be treating them; and also because if they had worn Muggle street clothes or doctors' clothing, many of the patients would have preferred death to being treated by them.

Kennedy scowled for a moment as he saw them approach, then did his best to put a blank expression on his face. They were two women, an old one and one in her middle thirties. They nodded in acknowledgment as they passed the two wizards.

"I can't believe Smethwyck's allowing those Muggle scum in here," hissed Kennedy under his breath when the women had passed. "Bloodstoppers or not."

"Horace Slughorn is a very persuasive man," remarked Professor Snape evenly. "And he shares Dumbledore's near-mania for all things Muggle."

"It'll be different when the Dark Lord's running things," Kennedy snarled. "He's promised me Smethwyck's job, once we take over."

Severus made a noncommital grunt. _I'm sure he has_, he thought darkly. _He promised me all sorts of things when I was your age, too..._

-------------------------------------

On a spot that marked the highest point of his gently rolling acreage, John Norton sat up straight on the seat of his old Schwinn bicycle – Severus' old bicycle, actually. He brushed away a stray fluffy cottonwood seed that had fallen on the cummerbund of his tuxedo, stretched the kinks out of his aging back – that liniment Severus made for him would definitely come in handy tonight – and looked out over all he could see: The orchards, the house, the outbuildings, the fields, everything. What he saw that fine sunny June day in 1998 made him feel content.

The spring of that year had been very wet in southeastern Minnesota, but there were enough dry spells in the middle of Norway Township to allow for getting the crops planted, and while the rain had been heavy, it hadn't washed away anything. Most of the farmers there did well enough that year.

It helped to be a small farmer like John Norton, as well as one with much of one's acreage invested in perennial crops like apples and berries and walnuts; there was a lot less to plant, and what he planted was more valuable than corn and soybeans. There were some other kinds of crops, too, but those weren't for sale. His long-lost son had need of them, and from a source his son's enemies would never suspect.

But now, his son's enemies – the enemies of pretty much most of the human race – had just been vanquished, and for good this time, it seemed. Much that had cause to be hidden could now be brought out into the open.

One of the things that had been hidden was, of course, the fact that Severus had come to be on the Norton farm in the first place. Yes, John and Sarah and Becky had been to Hogwarts, but officially only because Hjordis and Julie had pestered Horace and Albus to bring them along for a visit, and only once openly. All their subsequent visits were done in secret, and they were sparing in their use of the Floo. (Unlike the Nortons, the Halvorsons were able to openly visit Hogwarts fairly often. Sluggo's interest in Hjordis and Julie was easily explained; he was known for collecting the special and the unique, be they people, beings or objects. He had invited vampires to his Slug Club soireés; inviting Muggles, especially those with unusual talents, would not be at all unlikely for him.)

Another hidden thing was the relationship between Severus and Julie. Being seen so much as being friendly to her, a Muggle, in public – well, that would have meant the end of Severus' career as a double agent. So when their paths happened to cross at St. Mungo's or at Hogwarts, as they sometimes did, they had needed to act as if they could barely tolerate each other. But now that Voldemort was gone and his Death Eaters defeated and/or imprisoned, Severus and Julie decided that they could go public, as it were.

And that was why John Norton was wearing a tux as he rode the old Schwinn out in the fields that day. Severus and Julie were "going public" in a very big way today.

They had to hold the event at the farm, both for magical security and secrecy reasons and because it would have cost an arm and a leg to rent a hall big enough to hold all of the bride's and groom's friends and relations. Luckily, John didn't have to do much in the way of organizing the thing: Sarah and Molly Weasley, between the two of them, had everything taken care of in very short order. He just took care of getting the beer. Well, that, and the pig for the pig roast, and the fifty-five-gallon oil drum the pig would be cooked in.

But wedding or no wedding, there were still farm tasks to be done. Weeds didn't take holidays. Sarah had chewed him out for not changing out of the tux first, but Severus or Molly would hit him with a cleaning spell if he needed it, once he came back.

_Speaking of which_, he thought to himself,_ I'd better get back home. Everybody should be showing up pretty soon..._

-------------------------

Both the Norton and Halvorson houses were hosting the wedding, and it was a good thing, too. Even with a severely pared-down list of invitees, there were still lots of people all over the place, wizard and Muggle. Every now and then, the air sizzled with the sound of yet another Apparating witch or wizard making an appearance at the side of the road at what passed for a discreet distance from the two houses.

Julie's mother and father were there, for starters, chatting with the Muggle justice of the peace under one of the large walnut trees in front of the Norton house while Julie's brother Kevin was escorting his own wife and their two small children around the farmstead, giving them wildly bogus explanations for each piece of farm machinery. Julie's sister Traci, meanwhile, was in her grandmother's parlor, engaged in conversation with Hjordis and with Horace Slughorn. The Longbottoms were there, too: Neville and his gran, and Frank and Alice as well, having been discharged as cured from St. Mungo's well over a year earlier. They were making conversation with Arthur and Molly Weasley, healthy and pink-cheeked and eminently sane.

And of course Becky was there, along with her own newly-acquired husband, Brian Gunderson. Wonder of wonders, she was actually having a civil conversation with her adopted older brother:

"Hey, Severus," she had said, waving a hand at the nervous groom as he came out of the Norton house, resplendent in a black tuxedo. (Mom and Dad had tried to talk him into a powder-blue one, but he absolutely put his foot down.) "You look good today."

"Thanks, Sis," the groom-to-be said, a small smile cracking the tense whiteness of his face. (Becky herself had become a teacher, and once she understood that some of Severus' pupils would be in attendance at the wedding, she generously refrained from calling him "Stink" in their presence. In turn, Severus refrained from calling her "Brat" in front of her husband.) "Have you seen Dad?"

Becky made a face. "He grabbed your bike so he could go out in the fields one last time today."

Severus made a short laugh. "He would, wouldn't he?" He turned his head in time to see two figures coming towards him from behind. "Becky, you remember these two persons from when you visited my school, I presume?"

Becky's crinkled in her father's squint as she smiled. "I should, but I don't – not the names, anyway." She held out a hand to the nearest of the two persons, a teenaged boy in a tux, with glasses and hair nearly as black as her brother's. "Hi, I'm Becky Gunderson and I'm an idiot."

"Harry Potter," said the boy in reply, taking her hand in his and shaking it. "And you're not an idiot – you were only at Hogwarts once, and that was well over a year and a half ago." He let go her hand and turned to his companion, a brown-eyed girl in a blue dress, with thick brown hair pulled back into a French braid. "This is Hermione Granger. We're both students at Hogwarts, at least for another few weeks."

Becky smiled. "Graduating, or getting kicked out?"

Harry laughed. "Graduating. Though it was a near thing at times."

"You both have Severus for a teacher?"

"Yes, we do," Hermione answered.

"You both behave yourselves in his classes?"

"I do, but Harry doesn't," Hermione said cheerfully.

Harry snorted. "You just don't get caught," he said.

"That's because I'm smarter than you."

"Are you confessing to having performed mischief in my class, Miss Granger?" Professor Snape asked in his silkiest, most dangerous voice.

Hermione's cheeks suddenly turned a bright red. "I, erm, ah–"

Severus drew himself up to his full intimidating height. "In lieu of detention, Miss Granger, I hereby sentence you to use a Cleansing Charm on my father, once he comes back from the fields. Do I make myself clear?"

The young witch's sigh of relief could have been heard in the next county. "Perfectly, sir."

"Don't act so relieved; you have _no idea _how dirty Dad can get," Becky said with a grin.

------------------------

The ceremony itself went fairly quickly, even with both Muggle and wizarding authorities taking turns at officiating.

The local justice of the peace went first. He had three other weddings to do that day, so he didn't dawdle; he had the bride and groom put through their paces and legally wed by the Muggle laws of the State of Minnesota in about five minutes flat, then hopped into his car to head off for the next event. If he had thought that there was anything odd about the attire of some of the guests, he didn't say anything; then again, with three beers in him, he may not have been inclined to notice anything.

Once he was safely on the road – Hermione having surreptitiously cast a Sobering Spell on the man before he put his key in the ignition – then it was time for the wizarding side of the ceremony to start.

There was of course only one choice to officiate. Albus Dumbledore was not only a good friend of both Severus and now Julie; he was also, by virtue of his exalted position with the Wizengamot, fully entitled by British wizarding law to join a couple in matrimony.

As before, the rings were exchanged, and the bride and groom recited the words expected of them. But there were subtle differences. The rings glowed whitely as they slid onto the fingers of the wedded couple, for one thing. And as Dumbledore closed the ceremony, placing his hands on their heads, a golden light shone about the three of them as they stood on the grass lawn in front of the cow barn.

John and Sarah Norton stood together, holding hands, and smiled as they watched the proceedings. So much had happened, so many ups and downs had come, and no doubt many more ups and downs would be coming in the future. But so much that had been wrong was put right, and this wedding was proof of that.

"Where will they be going for their honeymoon?" John whispered to his wife.

"They're not telling," Sarah whispered back, as Severus and Julie, still glowing both literally and figuratively, came back into the milling crowd to be congratulated. "I think they're hoping to keep the Weasley Twins from pulling the wizarding version of a wedding prank."

John gave a short laugh. "Good luck with that," he said. "I thought I saw one of them pin something to Severus' collar just now. Probably a homing device."

"Probably," agreed Sarah. She and John hadn't been face to face with the Weasley boys until today, but they knew them by reputation.

John found himself staring at Severus as he walked through the crowd with Julie at his side, accepting the well-wishes of the guests, completely happy for once in his life.

"My son," he murmured. "My son who fell from the sky."

"_Our_ son," Sarah corrected, gently but firmly.

"Our son," John agreed, squeezing her hand. "Now and forever."

_The End_


	25. Author's Note B flat

Rat Fink had the best advice for authors and their readers: "If I gotta explain, ya wouldn't understand." But I'll try anyway, because I'm stupid. :-)

Why did I skip over the Whole Grand Plot Shebang of Book Seven? Because that really wasn't the focus of this little story -- all of the get-Voldemort business was pushed to the background, and I really wasn't interested in recapitulating it when it wasn't the point of the story.

The point was simply this: **What if a teenaged Severus Snape had had, if only for a little while, a happy life with loving father, mother, siblings and even a girlfriend? What happens when that life is snatched from him? And what happens when he gets it back, after a fashion?**

To that end, the story was 90 flashback, with intermittent bits showing how Severus' associates in the present were working to heal him. For dramatic purposes, the story really ended when Severus finally came to his senses and found his Dad smiling down at him. Everything else that followed was just tying up loose ends; out of necessity, the Nortons and the Halvorsons could not play major roles in the War on Voldie (being that they are helpless Muggles and all; only in Severus' coma-driven hallucinations does John Norton wield a shotgun against the Dark Lord), and since they play key roles in my story, it made sense to skip over twenty-odd extra chapters in favor of cutting straight to scenes where the Ns and Hs figured prominently.

Like I've said before, this is about the most atypical HP fanfic imaginable. There's no sex, no real suspense (we know from the beginning that Severus' idyllic days with the Nortons are destined to be cut short, and that he will be Obliviated), no songfic-inspired angsty-wangstyness. It's just about a boy -- and the people who come to be his loved ones.

UPDATE: Chapter 23 has been updated to tie up a few loose ends, most of them involving Julie. There may be another bit of writing coming along later -- I thought it'd be interesting to get Whitehound's take on Julie and Severus. Watch your mailbox for further announcements...


	26. Update: Ch 23 revised

UPDATE: Chapter 23 has been updated to tie up a few loose ends, most of them involving Julie. There's still no twenty-odd pages leading up to The Grand Confrontation, though.

There may be another bit of writing coming along later -- I thought it'd be interesting to get Whitehound's take on Julie and Severus. Watch your mailbox for further announcements...


End file.
